Word: mail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thousands of computers. But a tiny mistake in the programming reportedly caused the virus to replicate much more rapidly than planned. Otherwise, Morris' program was an impressive piece of work. It flew around Arpanet and Milnet at nearly the speed of light, disguised as a piece of ordinary electronic mail. Once inside a computer, it released a small army of surreptitious subprograms. One instructed the computer to make hundreds of copies of the original program. Another searched out the names of the users with legitimate access to the system and identified their secret passwords. A third told the computer...
...final warning of a government clampdown came last month from Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha. It meant that the regime could close the Weekly Mail at any moment. Last week Botha did just that, barring publication of the small (circ. 25,000), liberal, antiapartheid tabloid for four weeks. In a statement released in Pretoria, Botha accused the Mail of "causing a threat to the safety of the public or to the maintenance of public order...
...Mail's co-editor, Anton Harber, called the suspension an act of "narrow-mindedness and intolerance." The editors pledged to keep the staff busy by bringing out special issues under other titles, on such topics as human rights and censorship. While the Mail will lose money, the paper is expected to survive the closing...
Stoll noted that the Cornell virus was the first true virus--a program with the ability to spread itself from computer to computer completely independently--ever released. Previous viruses depended on users taking certain steps, such as running a particular file or sending electronic mail, to allow them to spread. Morris' virus was programmed...
...infected host computer first sent a short message through "electronic mail" over the Internet to the target computer. By using a number of tricks, Morris' program made the target machine treat the message as a command program instead of ordinary mail, which the computer places into a file to be read by users if they wish. The message--now acting like a program--told each computer which received it to ask the host computer for the rest of the virus, according to Mckay Professor of Computer Science Mark Friedell...