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One Command Broke 10% of the Internet. Here's How.
Long before ransomware and zero-day exploits, one grad student accidentally brought down a big chunk of the internet... with a single command.
Long before ransomware and zero-day exploits, one grad student accidentally brought down a big chunk of the internet. And he did it with a single command. It was 1988, and the Morris Worm spread faster than anyone expected, infecting about 10% of all connected machines at the time. It was the first major wake-up call in cybersecurity; and its impact still echoes in how we build and protect systems today.
This Week’s Highlights:
It Started With a Curious Experiment
Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell graduate student, launched the worm from MIT to test how big the internet really was. The problem? The code had a bug: it re-infected systems over and over, clogging memory and CPU. Within hours, the worm had spread to thousands of Unix systems across major universities, research labs, and military sites.
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No One Was Ready
In 1988, there was no playbook for responding to a digital worm. No CERT teams, no coordinated incident response. Sysadmins had to patch systems manually, disconnect networks, and reverse engineer the code on the fly. The estimated damage? Between $100,000 and $10 million. And all because of a few lines of buggy code.
The Morris Worm gave rise to the very first Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and helped kickstart the modern cybersecurity industry. It also highlighted key ideas we still rely on today:
Input validation matters
Rate limiting prevents abuse
Code transparency and peer review aren’t optional
Today, with AI writing code and global systems connected 24/7, that one worm feels more relevant than ever. Small mistakes can have massive consequences. And history has a funny way of repeating itself.
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