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  • 2 Jul, 2020

The computer virus «Morris» was created for testing," said Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell University in 1988.

He spread the virus by trying to measure the size of the Internet, but the situation got out of hand. The virus infected 6,000 university and government computers, slowing them down, sometimes causing the system to shut down. The virus copied itself endlessly (often on the same computer several times) and continued to spread.

Morris was convicted by a court and fined, but was not jailed for his small research project. Today he is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Let's hope his students learn from their professor's mistakes.