It forced many computer experts to rethink computer security and the nature of the Internet, and we’re still learning the same lessons today. The Internet Worm was quite probably the first computer virus to spread across the Internet, and the first one noticed by the mainstream. Some estimates say that the worm hit over six thousand computers, and the government claims damages of at least ten million dollars. Infected computers were spending every available bit of power into hunting for more computers to infect. Fourteen percent is a small number in human terms, but a huge number in microseconds. Morris hadn’t counted on the speed of the program. Within hours, the Internet had slowed to a crawl. On November 2, 1998, Morris released his creation from a computer at MIT (to hide the fact that the virus was created at Cornell). The main part of the program was designed to hack into known Unix weaknesses, like the Finger bug and Sendmail. So, Morris programmed it to install another copy of itself fourteen percent of the time. It would be really easy to prevent the spread of the program just by telling all of the computers on the network to always answer “yes' when the virus checked. Unfortunately, at the same time, he made it stupid.
