Morris worm

[1] It was written by a graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on 8:30 p.m. November 2, 1988, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network.

[2] A friend of Morris said that he created the worm simply to see if it could be done,[3] and released it from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the hope of suggesting that its creator studied there, instead of Cornell.

Possibly based on these numbers, Stoll, a systems administrator known for discovering and subsequently tracking the hacker Markus Hess three years earlier, estimated for the US Government Accountability Office that the total economic impact was between $100,000 and $10,000,000.

Stoll helped fight the worm, writing in 1989 that "I surveyed the network, and found that two thousand computers were infected within fifteen hours.

Stoll commented that the worm showed the danger of monoculture, because "If all the systems on the ARPANET ran Berkeley Unix, the virus would have disabled all fifty thousand of them.

Graham claimed, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them".

The Morris worm prompted DARPA to fund the establishment of the CERT/CC at Carnegie Mellon University, giving experts a central point for coordinating responses to network emergencies.