Showing Revision 3 created 05/25/2016 by Udacity Robot.

1. Title:
   1988 Internet Worm - Software Testing
2. Description:

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   So now let's talk about the 1988 Internet worm.
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   There are several interesting things about this Internet worm.
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   Probably the main one is that it was one of the first worms
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   that actually got widespread attention.
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   It got this attention for good reason.
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   If you remember 1988, the Internet was not particularly well known to the general public,
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   and it had a relatively small number of users.
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    And even so, this worm infected an estimated 6,000 machines.
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    And while this is a really tiny number compared to a modern worm
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    or a modern botnet or something like this,
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    this was a substantial fraction of the number of machines connected to the Internet at the time.
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    The way this worm spread is it used computers' Internet connections
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    to exploit known vulnerabilities in the UNIX hosts of the time.
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    Of course, at the time, the existence of a remotely exploitable bug
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    wasn't considered nearly as serious as it would be considered today
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    because, of course, the 1988 worm and all of the subsequent ones hadn't happened yet.
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    One of these bugs was a buffer overflow exploit in the finger daemon,
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    and this was a service that would run on UNIX machines of the time,
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    and the finger daemon would let you query a remote machine
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    to learn about whether a user was logged in to that machine and some other stuff.
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    And so now let's ask the question, would random testing have changed the outcome?
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    Well, it seems extremely likely not because these bugs were known at the time.
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    On the other hand, let's ask a little bit different question.
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    Could this bug in finger daemon and lots of other bugs like it
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    have been found by random testing?
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    And the answer to the question is probably yes.
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    In fact, if we go back to the original fuzzing paper,
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    one of the bugs that was found was caused by the same programming practice
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    that provided one of the security holes to the Internet worm.
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    So basically, even in its original fairly weak form
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    where fuzzing was done with completely random data,
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    it was finding the kind of bugs that were causing security holes.
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    This remains true to this day, but fuzzers are used to find a lot of exploitable vulnerabilities
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    in hosts that have Internet-facing services.
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    So in summary, it could have found the kind of bugs that the worm exploited
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    and others like it had people been running fuzzers a couple of years earlier.