In November 1988, Cornell grad student Robert Tappan Morris unleashed the first major worm onto the fledgling internet, allegedly “just experimenting.” Morris’s worm rapidly crippled thousands of UNIX servers through exploits in sendmail and finger daemon, causing an unprecedented denial of service. After the dust settled, Morris got slapped with a federal conviction, while sysadmins everywhere learned the bitter lesson: security isn’t optional—even if most still treat it as such.
