History and stories
The Morris worm: the night the early internet slowed down
Robert Morris wanted to measure the size of the internet. A single mistake in his program turned the experiment into its first major security incident.
1 min readStory
The short version
In 1988, a graduate student's experiment spread out of control and slowed thousands of computers. It changed how the internet handles security.
The story
On November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell University, released a program designed to travel from computer to computer on the internet, using known weaknesses and weak passwords to get in.
He said later that he meant it to count how many computers were connected. But the program copied itself onto computers it had already reached, again and again. Machines filled up with copies and slowed to a halt. Universities, research labs and military sites across the country spent days cleaning up.
Morris became the first person convicted under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He went on to become a professor at MIT and a co-founder of the startup investor Y Combinator.
What changed afterward
The incident showed that nobody was in charge of responding when something went wrong across the whole network. Within weeks, the US government funded a computer emergency response team at Carnegie Mellon University, the first of the response teams that now exist around the world.
The lesson today
The worm got in through flaws that already had known fixes and through passwords that were easy to guess. More than thirty years later, those are still the two most reliable ways into a network. Keeping systems updated and passwords strong is unglamorous work, and it is still most of the job.
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