Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stoll, however, noted that Morris injected the virus late at night, when computeroperators would be least alert. Furthermore,Morris encrypted the virus in a secret code whichstumped initial efforts to read the program. Also,Stoll said Morris never passed along the simplecode built into the virus which would have haltedits spread...
...virus, written by Cornell graduate student Robert T. Morris Jr. '87-'88, began its attack on mainframes across the country, including ones at Harvard, at midnight last Wednesday...
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...
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...
Since the virus spread 10 times faster thanMorris had intended, the experts said, computersbegan to slow down and lose memory becausemultiple copies of the program were trying tobreak into the same computer at the same time...