Word: computerizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cliff Stoll, an astrophysicist currently working at Harvard, said in a Jefferson Hall lecture last night on computer security that while the virus was not programmed to be destructive, it was intentionally set up to be extremely difficult to defeat.
Stoll said he is not sure how, or if, Morris should be punished and took great pains to avoid the question. He said part of the reason for his indecision stems from his friendship with the young hacker's father, Robert Morris Sr., who works for the National Computer Security...
Friends of Morris at Harvard have said that the young computer wizard, fatigued from lack of sleep, made an error in his program that caused the virus to run amok, crippling literally thousands of mainframe computer systems.
Computer experts say that once the virusinfiltrated a computer, it used that machine tolaunch attacks on nearby systems. The viruspropagated itself through the Internet, a computernetwork that connects most major educational,commercial and military computers throughout thenation.
Morris' error, according to experts contactedyesterday, was that he instructed the virus tospread to every 10th, rather than every 100th,adjacent computer on the Internet. The result ofthis forgotten zero was that the number of copiesof the virus increased exponentially at astaggering rate, bogging down computers with itssheer size.