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in battle in a specially reserved area of the computer’s memory. The game, which was written in the early 1960s at Bell, used ‘killer’ programs that were designed to wipe out the defences of the opponent. The curious similarities between Core Wars and the Internet worm were often cited in press reports.

Morris received an enormous amount of publicity after his identity became known. His motives have been endlessly reviewed and analyzed, not least in a recent book, Cyberpunk, that was partly devoted to the Internet Worm. The consensus is that Morris wrote a program that fulfilled a number of criteria, including the ability to propagate widely, but that he vastly underestimated the speed at which it would spread and infect – then reinfect – machines. He himself called the worm ‘a dismal failure’ and claimed it was never intended to slow down computers or cause them to crash.⁶ His intention, he said, was for the program to make a single copy on each machine and then hide within the network. When he realized, on the night of 2 November, that his program was crashing computers on the linked networks, he asked a friend, Andrew Sudduth, to post an electronic message with an apology and instructions for killing the program. That was the message sent out at 3.34 a.m., the one overlooked in the general confusion.

Morris was indicted for ‘intentionally and without authorization’ accessing ‘Federal interest computers’, preventing their use and causing a loss of at least $1,000 (that figure being the minimum loss for an indictment). The charge, under a section of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, potentially carries a fine of $250,000 and up to five years in prison.

Morris was tried in January 1990. His defence lawyers said Morris had been attempting to ‘help security’ on Internet and that his program had simply got out of control. The prosecution argued that ‘the worm was not merely a mistake; it was a crime against the government of the United States’.

On the 22 January a Federal jury found Morris guilty – the first conviction under that particular section of the 1986 Act. Despite the verdict the judge stated that he believed the sentencing requirements did not apply in Morris’s case, saying the circumstances did not

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