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The younger Morris apparently created the virus as an experiment, intending that it would slowly copy itself across Arpanet, resting harmlessly in thousands of computers. But a tiny mistake in the programming reportedly caused the virus to replicate much more rapidly than planned. Otherwise, Morris' program was an impressive piece of work. It flew around Arpanet and Milnet at nearly the speed of light, disguised as a piece of ordinary electronic mail. Once inside a computer, it released a small army of surreptitious subprograms. One instructed the computer to make hundreds of copies of the original program. Another searched out the names of the users with legitimate access to the system and identified their secret passwords. A third told the computer to send copies of the original program to every other system on its mailing list.
The outbreak sent computer scientists scrambling to halt its spread. Russell Brand, who works for California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was one of the first to spot the problem. A quick survey of the lab's 400 machines showed that several computers had already been infected and that the contagion was growing rapidly. By early Thursday, computer operators had shut the system down and begun cleaning out the files. Then, recalls one of Brand's colleagues, "30 seconds after we restarted the system, the infection was back."
Other computer centers had better luck. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., alerted to the problem by colleagues at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., immediately "guillotined" their computers from the network to keep from getting hit. As a preventive measure, Maryland's Goddard Space Flight Center shut off its system on Thursday. Eventually, the Defense Department brought down both Arpanet and Milnet and began efforts to tighten the security of the networks.
By week's end the contagion was largely contained. Defense Department officials were quick to point out that no data had been lost, no files destroyed, and none of the Government's most sensitive computer operations -- systems that do everything from gather intelligence to launch missiles -- had been compromised. But the event raised disturbing questions. "It shouldn't be so easy," says Lawrence Rogers, head of Princeton's Office of Computing and Information Technology. Harold Highland, editor of Computers & Security magazine, sees a useful lesson. "This attack is a wake-up call to all operators and users of computer networks," he says. In an interview with the Times, Robert Morris Sr. agreed: "It is likely to make people more careful and more attentive to vulnerabilities in the future."