Who created the Morris worm, released on the early Internet in November 1988?

Robert Tappan Morris created the Morris worm, which was released on the Internet on 2 November 1988.

Morris was a graduate student at Cornell University when he designed the self-replicating program. It exploited weaknesses in Unix services and spread from computer to computer. Although Morris said it was intended to measure the size of the Internet, a programming error caused the worm to reinfect systems repeatedly, slowing or disabling many of them.

The incident became one of the earliest widely publicized Internet security events. Estimates commonly cited for the affected systems range around 6,000 computers, a significant share of the Internet at that time. The worm did not destroy files, but its resource consumption caused serious disruption.

Morris was convicted under the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. His case helped establish that creating or releasing self-propagating code could lead to criminal liability, even when the creator claimed no intention to cause damage.