Page "Morris worm" Paragraph 2

According to its creator, the Morris worm was not written to cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet.

However, the worm was released from MIT to disguise the fact that the worm originally came from Cornell.

Additionally, the Morris worm worked by exploiting known vulnerabilities in Unix sendmail, finger, and rsh / rexec, as well as weak passwords.

Due to reliance on rsh ( normally disabled on untrusted networks ) it should not succeed on a recent, properly configured system.