ABSTRACT
The Morris worm was one of the earliest computer network worms dispersed via the Internet on November 2, 1988. It was the first to achieve substantial mainstream media consideration. Moreover, the worm brought about the first felony conviction in the United States under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Morris worm was developed by a graduate student at Cornell University, a fellow who went by the name of Robert Tappan Morris, and launched from a computer located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus. The Morris worm has occasionally been nicknamed the "Great Worm" due to the highly disturbing outcome it had on the Internet during the time of its release, taking into account the overall system downtime and impact relative to the perception of security and reliability of the Internet. The nickname was taken from the "Great Worms" of Tolkien's Middle Earth Trilogy: Scatha and Glaurung.
