Even before
the Internet was “the Internet,” it was a breeding ground for worms that could
spread between loosely protected and networked machines. One of the first of
its kind, the now famous Morris worm, spread across the world over ARPANET, a
progenitor to the modern Internet designed by what was then the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) for the Department of Defense. The son of a
computer security expert for the National Security Agency, Robert Tappan Morris
crafted the worm out of sheer boredom as an experiment. It’d go on to propagate
across ARPANET over a period of days in 1988, flooding the network and
disrupting 6,000 of 60,000 hosts by reproducing files and overwhelming computers’
memories. It also led to the creation of the original Computer Emergency
Response Team.
(Photo via The Computer History Museum / tobascodagama Flickr photostream)
