On this day, July 26, in 1988, Robert T. Morris, the son of a former chief scientist of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, became the first person charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for creating a worm virus.
Morris was a student at Cornell University when he created the “Morris Worm.” The bug was designed to count the number of computers connected to the Internet, but a flaw caused it to replicate rapidly, spreading to thousands of computers and causing more than $500,000 in damage.
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