Robert Tappan Morris
More info
- Born
- 1965
- Affiliation
- Cornell, Viaweb, Y Combinator, MIT
- Known for
- The Morris worm
The grad student whose 1988 experiment brought the internet to its knees, and who went on to become an MIT professor and venture capitalist.
On 2 November 1988 Morris, then a doctoral student at Cornell, released self-propagating code that exploited, among other things, a buffer overflow in fingerd and a debug backdoor in sendmail. A bug in its spreading logic meant the same machines were reinfected again and again, and the Morris worm knocked out thousands of Unix systems. In 1990 he became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: probation, community service and a fine.
The irony runs in the family: his father, Robert Morris Sr., had written Unix password encryption and was chief scientist at the NSA's computer security centre. The son co-founded Viaweb with Paul Graham in 1995 and Y Combinator in 2005.