By the next day, John Markoff, a reporter for The New York Times, had already gotten the hacker’s name: Robert Tappan Morris. Markoff knew no more until a top computer expert for the National Security Agency returned a call. The source, Bob Morris, confirmed that one Robert Tappan Morris had written the worm. “Isn’t that a funny coincidence,” said Markoff. “You both have the same name.”
“That’s no coincidence,” Morris replied. “He’s my son.”
Markoff’s story was the first of a journalistic flood. But for all the ink spilled over the Cornell graduate student’s case, little insight into his personality emerged. Computer-security experts would later try to paint Morris as a menacing rebel: Abu Nidal at the keyboard. Some journalists probed the irony of a computer-security expert’s son-turned-security-threat, ham-handedly coming up with a dark psychological portrait, an Oedipus Techs.
If you ever wanted a clearer picture of the nerd who brought down the network, a new book, “Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier,” delivers him, and the entire Morris family, up in rich detail. The authors, Markoff and journalist Katie Hafner, explain that Morris, like his father, is a classic hacker. Before that word took on criminal connotations, it was a term of pride for a programmer who finds beauty-and fun-in elegantly crafted lines of code. Poking around in security holes was a challenge for both generations of Morrises; the elder Morris happened to earn a living doing it.
“Cyberpunk” throws a spotlight on two other computer fanatics whose acts took them over the line of law. One is Kevin Mitnick, an obsessive system cracker (he liked phone companies and Digital Equipment Corp. computers) who was ordered by a California court to undergo treatment for his hacking “addiction.” The other, West German Hans Hubner, attempted to sell information from his Internet trespasses to the KGB; this account is the flip side to “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” computer sleuth Clifford Stoll’s 1989 book about his hunt for West German hackers. L Morris story, each is told in context that, while not justifying criminal acts, goes along way toward explaining them.
Though readers who know a modem from a Model T have a head start, the authors offer lucid explanations of just enough technology to make the stories work, even for the computer illiterate. If the prose sometimes seems a bit workmanlike, there’s plenty of juicy detail to keep the narrative moving. Hafner and Markoff, like the dedicated, intense cyberpunks they illuminate, appear to have stopped at nothing to hack their way into the cyberpunk subculture.
