The first computer virus to spread across the global internet was released by accident in November 1988 by a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris — who claimed he only wanted to measure the size of the internet, but a coding error caused his program to replicate uncontrollably, crashing roughly 10 percent of all computers connected to the network at the time and resulting in the first criminal conviction in history for cyber-misconduct
At 8:30 in the evening on Wednesday 2 November 1988, a 23-year-old graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris, in his first semester of a PhD programme in computer science at Cornell University, logged into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer fr…
At 8:30 in the evening on Wednesday 2 November 1988, a 23-year-old graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris, in his first semester of a PhD programme in computer science at Cornell University, log… [+7846 chars]