November 2, 2018, marked the 30-year anniversary of the Morris Worm.

It seems the more things change, the more things stay the same. It’s a bit ironic that as more and more devices get connected to the Internet (~20 billion+ today versus ~60,000 in 1988), we are still susceptible to malware. What we probably didn’t quite understand or grasp back in 1988 is that, one day, we would need to worry about protecting Industrial Control Systems (ICS) from malware.

In 1988, Tripwire Founder Gene Kim was in high school working part-time at Sun Microsystems as a system administrator when the Morris Worm broke out on November 2. He witnessed, first hand, the power of the Worm, where he was part of the team that had to understand why their computing infrastructure was not operating in the way it was intended.

He had to determine what changed. The day before, everything was operating normally. Why were all of the computers becoming inoperable now? As you could imagine, trying to understand what happened and how to fix it became an intense passion for Gene. This passion lead Gene to read Dr. Gene Spafford’s abstract on the Morris Worm, “The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis” (PDF).

This abstract inspired him to attend Purdue University. At Purdue is where he eventually did an independent study project under the guidance of Dr. Spafford and fostered the seeds of what one day would become Tripwire, the company.

To help pay for school, Gene worked at the Purdue Computing Center as a system administrator. This is where he would work on his independent study project to prove that files could be compared by signatures, a process by which hashes are created to compare files without having to store the entire file.

For months, Gene (Read more...)