Are you looking for who to blame for your infected computer? blame this man

Individuals and businesses spend tons of money on protecting their systems from the harmful effect of virus infection which leads to losses in data thus affecting business, having a system without an anti-virus is inviting trouble. 


If you have been blaming your friend for inserting that usb flash drive into your system, you are looking at the wrong guy. This is the man to blame Robert Tappan Moriris, the creator of the first internet virus.

On July 26, 1989, Cornell graduate student Robert Tappan 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 Cornell graduate student when he developed the first widely spread Internet “worm.” He released it on Nov. 2, 1988, using MIT’s systems to disguise the fact that he was a Cornell student.

The worm was intended to be harmless, but Morris made a mistake in writing it. He hoped that only one copy of the worm would infect each computer, but in an attempt to circumvent computers that would say it already had a copy, he “programmed the worm to duplicate itself every seventh time it received a ‘yes’ response,” explains eWeek.

The Morris worm began replicating itself at a far faster rate than he intended, flooding hard drives and causing extensive damage. A friend of Morris tried to send out a warning to other users, but many systems had already shut down.

In just a few days, the Morris worm traveled across Arpanet, the precursor to today’s Internet, and infected more than 6,000 computers at universities, research centers and military installations.