It is one of the least publicized achievements of the computer revolution: a huge, arching communications network connecting 60,000 computers by high-speed data links and ordinary telephone lines. Developed by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, Arpanet, as the information grid is called, has carried everything from unclassified military data to electronic love notes sent from one lonely researcher to another. But last week it became the conduit for something much more dramatic: one of the most sophisticated and infectious computer viruses the world has yet seen.
The trouble surfaced in computer centers at two institutions that serve as major network links: M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley. Last Wednesday night computers at both centers started furiously generating unwanted electronic files, clogging up their storage systems and slowing operations to a crawl. Almost immediately, similar problems began turning up at other centers throughout the network, from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington to New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within hours, operators shut down thousands of machines across the country to quarantine them, severing their connections to other computers and rendering productive work all but impossible.
Last week's infection was the latest manifestation of an epidemic of viruses that has struck the U.S. in the past year. Similar to its biological counterpart, an electronic virus is a program that copies itself by taking control of a computer's internal machinery. Unlike more malicious versions, the new virus did not destroy data stored in computers, but it did disrupt the work of tens of thousands of researchers hooked into Arpanet. It also penetrated unclassified branches of a second, more secure network called Milnet, which is used by military researchers. Said a Government computer expert: "The kid simply put us out of action."
"The kid," according to the New York Times, turned out to be Robert T. Morris Jr., a 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University. His father is Robert Morris Sr., chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center in Maryland. The center, a division of the National Security Agency, works to protect Government computers from outside attack. The elder Morris, who was one of the first researchers to experiment with viruses at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the early 1960s, when they were still considered a game, is a top expert on combating the kind of sabotage in which his son allegedly engaged. The father would not discuss the case in detail, but admitted that his son was "very well trained in computer science" and said the episode sounded like "the work of a bored graduate student."