The worm that brought down the internet

In 1988, a 23-year-old student released a program onto the network that was meant to be a harmless experiment. Within hours it had taken down a good part of the internet.

Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell and the son of an NSA security expert, wanted to measure the size of the network with a program that could copy itself from machine to machine. But a flaw in his own code made it ravenous: it replicated over and over on the same computers until it left them useless. It infected some six thousand machines, around ten percent of the entire internet at the time.

Morris became the first person convicted under the U.S. computer fraud law: a fine, probation and community service. The scare did some good: it led to the creation of the first computer emergency response team. He, incidentally, ended up as a professor at MIT.

Source: FBI