I found out later that one of my one of my friends was the duty officer at the

Pentagon at the room where the bridge was between the internet and the mill net.

And he had been given orders that if anything happened,

he was supposed to turn a key, open a box, and hit a red red switch which would actually cause an explosion in the

chassis and physically separate the networks.

And so he was there late at night.

Oh yeah, very, very, well military thinking at the time.

This was positive disconnection.

So he was working late at night and the call came in to blow the net. Hi, I'm Ryan Levy, and welcome to the Malicious Life podcast.

In previous episodes of our show, I've introduced you to some of the seminal malware attacks that have shaped cyber security history.

Perhaps no other incident in history, though, has had the effect on how we think about computer security today as the Morse War.

To get a sense of how big a deal the Morris worm was, consider this. It was responsible for taking down at its time 10% of the entire

internet. 10% all from a program only 99 lines long.

For some, the Morris worm was a fascinating thing, a wake-up call to an emerging new field.

For others, it was frustrating or scary scary the kind of thing that could lead

Pentagon officers to order an explosion in their own building. For the Worms

Creator it was a bit of everything.

All that aside though, Morris has already affected your life in major ways you may not have yet realized.

By the end of this episode, you'll know what I mean.

Robert Morris has a very unusual quality.

He's never wrong. That's how Paul Graham, founder of Vyav Webb and co-founder of Y

combinator, once famously described his longtime friend. Robert Morris has been described in many ways in the past three decades

...