Robert Tappan Morris (of the “Morris worm”)
Credited with being the first guy to invent an internet worm (and the first to be arrested for it), Morris is an interesting figure and, like a lot of hackers of his era, a very unlikely criminal. A graduate of Harvard, Morris was continuing his academic career at Cornell University when he created a computer program that wreaked a whole lot of havoc. The worm, which originated in MIT’s servers, was unfurled on Nov. 2, 1988, subsequently causing a widespread denial-of-service attack that affected much of the existing internet at the time. It’s unclear whether it was intentionally or accidentally malicious, but, whatever the case, the worm ate its way through approximately 10% of the computers connected to the web at the time (admittedly a relatively small number), leaving many of them in a wounded, zombified state. It became known as the “Morris worm.” For his creation, Morris was subsequently convicted of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—a first at that time, since the law had only been passed two years earlier. He was sentenced to probation and, over the following 30 years, he’s become a celebrity in his own right.
