n December 1990, the US Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit affirmed the conviction of Robert
Tappen Morris in the first celebrated computer
crime case of what we now call “the Internet Age.”
Morris was convicted of violating the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act (CFAA)
1
for releasing an Internet worm
designed to “spread widely without drawing attention to
itself … occupy little computer operation time, and thus
not interfere with normal use of the computers.”
2
Sadly, although 15 years have passed since Morris’s
conviction, those tasked with protecting the muchexpanded Internet infrastructures can attest to the fact
that little has changed. Today’s computer security experts—a horde of defenders armored with an alphabet
soup of certifications, including CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), GIAC (Global
Information Assurance Certification), SCNP (Security
Certified Network Professional), and CISA (Certified
Information Systems Auditor)—spend much of their
time defending, or planning to defend, against the
scourge that Morris initiated. Indeed, a multibilliondollar “endpoint security” industry has sprouted and
grown to assist these efforts.
3,4
Nonetheless, the job of today’s defenders is arguably
harder than that of their counterparts in the early ’90s. This
is true despite our dramatically increased problem awareness and the fact that we now have a wide range of automated defense tools. The reason is simple; in the text of
that early Morris decision, the court foreshadowed our increasing defense difficulties when it noted that the worm
was released from
an MIT computer to
“disguise the fact that [it] came from Morris at Cornell.”
From the start, malicious code releasers have sought
to obscure their identities by initiating attacks from unexpected places. However, the sophistication of such efforts has advanced dramatically over the past 15 years. As
a result, organizations face tremendous challenges in
protecting themselves within the bounds of a legal
framework established to prevent computer abuse of all
kinds, both offensive and defensive. Here, I discuss the
state of the emerging threats, and the legalities of attack
and response, and outline a reasoned approach to organizational defense.