In 1988, a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris released a self-replicating program to measure the size of the internet — within hours it had crashed roughly 6,000 of the 60,000 machines then online, and computer security became a field
On the evening of 2 November 1988, a small program written by a Cornell graduate student escaped into a nascent internet of about 60,000 machines and paralysed roughly a tenth of them, forcing the United States to invent an entire discipline in response.
