Captions by Associated Press.
On July 26, 1989, Robert Morris was indicted for spreading the Internet’s first worm virus, infecting more than 6,000 university, research center and military computers. Robert Tappan Morris was a Harvard graduate and a graduate student at Cornell when he developed the first widely spread Internet virus, and the first “worm” virus. He developed the worm to “gauge the size of the Internet,” but it ended up spreading through a network of 60,000 computers, infecting 6,000 of them. His worm traveled across Arpanet, the precursor to today’s Internet, and infected machines at universities, research centers and military installations. Ironically, Morris’s father was the chief technology scientist for the National Security Agency at the time.Once discovered, Morris was the first person indicted for Internet hacking under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Morris was found guilty in 1990 and sentenced to 400 hours of community service and three years’ probation, and fined $10,050.[AP finding dulcinea]