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The suppositions were wrong.

Internet’s rogue program became a media event. The New York Times called the incident ‘the largest assault ever on the nation’s systems’. The program itself became known as the Internet virus or the Internet worm.⁵ At a press conference on Thursday at MIT, the day after the worm was released on to ARPANET, the university’s normally reticent computer boffins found themselves facing ten camera crews and twenty-five reporters. The press, the MIT researchers felt, was principally concerned with confirming details of either the collapse of the entire US computer system or the beginning of a new world war – or preferably both. One participant had nightmarish visions of a tabloid headline: ‘Computer Virus Escapes to Humans, 96 Killed.’

The incident received world-wide press coverage. Along the way the extent of the damage was magnified. One of the first estimates – from John McAfee, the ever-quotable chairman of CVIA – was that cleaning up the networks and fixing the system’s flaws would cost $96 million. Other estimates ran as high as $186 million. These figures were widely repeated. It was estimated at first that about 6,200 machines, or 10 per cent of the computers on Internet, had been infected; later, cooler heads revised this figure down to around 2,000. As for the clean-up cost, that has now been calculated at around $1 million, and even that figure is based on the assumed value of ‘down-time’ – the notional loss of income while a computer is idle. The actual restitutional cost has been assessed as $150,000. McAfee’s estimate of $96 million was dismissed as being ‘grossly exaggerated’ by Cornell University’s subsequent report on the incident.

By the time the real assessments had been made the identity of the author of the worm was known. He was Robert Morris, Jr, a twenty-three-year-old graduate of Harvard University and, at the time of the incident, a post-graduate student at Cornell. Far from being an embittered hacker or an outsider, he was very much the product of an ‘insider’ family. His father, Robert Morris, Sr, was the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a nationally recognized expert on computer crime and a veteran of the Bell Laboratories. He was, coincidentally, also one of the three designers of a high-tech game called Core Wars, in which two programs engage

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