buffer overflow (10. 263)

Released on this day in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network (to avoid suspicion at his own university), the eponymous Morris worm (short for tapeworm due to its parasitic lifestyle) was one of the first to be distributed on the internet, written by a graduate student from Cornell named Robert Tappan Morris—the son of a US National Security Agency cryptographer, and exploited a range of vulnerabilities to propagate, and like a fork bomb was able to crash systems by overburndening them. Intended as a white-hat hacking exercise to explore vulnerabilities, Morris had originally programmed the worm to check if a system was already infected but instead instructed it to replicate itself a given percentage of times—leading to a destructive, exponential avalanche of malicious code, leading to his conviction under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Paying a hefty fine and suspended from school, Morris nonetheless would go on to become a professor of computer science at MIT and co-found Viaweb, one of the first web apps and the venture capital funding firm Y Combinator, backing the launch of over three thousand internet ventures, including DoorDash, Reddit, Twitch and Airbnb.