On November 2, 1988, for the first time in the world, there was an idea of the existence of a virus on the Internet. That same day, a virus named "Morris" has been blown up to 6,000 servers across the United States - about 10 percent of all computers connected to the Internet. The virus infected them by using known spaces of "Sendmail" and "fingered" programs of "Unix" systems and by choosing user passwords from mini-dictionary.

It was later discovered that the author of the virus was Robert Morris, a graduate student at Cornell University. He admitted that this was done by his father's insistence at the US National Security Agency. According to preliminary estimates, the virus inflicted $ 96.5 million, but despite this, the postgraduate was able to survive with conditional fine and a small fine.

R. Morris has made use of infected computer resources, causing a minor mistake in the code, causing the program to replicate itself many times, ferra.ru reports.

At present, R. Morris is a professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The disks of the program's output code are stored in the Boston Museum of Science.

It should be noted that thanks to the virus of the US scientist, people began to think seriously about the information security, and the multi-billionaire antivirus software market was created.