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HE WANTED TO MEASURE THE INTERNET, BUT ENDED UP BREAKING IT AND MAKING HISTORY

HE WANTED TO MEASURE THE INTERNET, BUT ENDED UP BREAKING IT AND MAKING HISTORY

via Dev.toAlex P

HE WROTE A SCRIPT OUT OF PURE CURIOSITY. BUT HE ENDED UP CRASHING 10% OF THE WORLD'S INTERNET, CAUSING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN DAMAGE, AND BECOMING THE FIRST PERSON EVER CONVICTED OF COMPUTER FRAUD Robert Tappan Morris, a student at Cornell University, didn’t want to be an evil hacker. He just wanted to see how big the internet was. However, because of one tiny mistake in his code, his harmless experiment turned into an unstoppable digital disaster THE STORY OF THE “GREAT WORM” It was 1988. The internet (then called ARPANET) was a small, closed club for universities, research centers, and the military. It was built on trust - nobody expected an attack from their own colleagues On November 2, 1988, 23-year-old Robert Morris launched a program to count all the computers connected to the internet. The program (later called the “Morris Worm”) spread by using known weaknesses in network tools like sendmail and fingerd, as well as weak passwords The idea was smart: the worm enters a server, c

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