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Although it’s not an enviable distinction, the Internet’s first computer worm is named after its creator, Robert Tappan Morris.  Unleashing the Morris Worm resulted in him being the first person prosecuted uner the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

While he was a grad student at Cornell University, Morris put his efforts into creating the worm ostensibly to determine the size of the Internet.  An unknown design flaw caused the worm to replicate excessively and spread rapidly.  It infected several thousand (perhaps as many as 6,000) computers by severely slowing them down and rendering them unusable.  Estimated repair cost at each system ranged from $200 to over $53,000.

For this, Morris received three years’ probation, was ordered to perform 400 hours of community service, and fined $10,500.

Robert Morris is now a tenured associate professor researching computer network architectures at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. 

An ironic twist to Morris’ story is that his father, Robert Morris, is the former chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency.

 

This is the end of the Black Hat Hackers, the bad boys turned good.  The remainder of this series will feature the White Hats, good boys turned better.