[4] Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm, and became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

[1][5] He went on to cofound the online store Viaweb, one of the first web applications,[6] and later the venture capital funding firm Y Combinator, both with Paul Graham and Trevor Blackwell.

He later joined the faculty in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received tenure in 2006.

However, Morris believed that some system administrators might try to defeat the worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive.

To compensate for this possibility, Morris programmed the worm to copy itself anyway, 14% of the time, no matter what the response was to the infection-status interrogation.

This level of persistence was a design flaw: it created system loads that brought it to the attention of administrators, and disrupted the target computers.