The Morris worm started as an experiment, insists Robert Tappan Morris, who in 1988 was a Cornell graduate student.
He distributed the worm in an attempt
to gauge how big the then-infant Internet was, but things kind of got
out of control from there. The worm spread to some 6,000 university and
government computers, slowing them down (and occasionally causing them
to crash) as it copied itself (often numerous times on one machine) and
spread.
Morris was convicted and fined, but
served no time for his little research project. Today, he's a professor
at MIT. Let's hope his students have learned from their professor's
mistakes.
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