30 years ago, the world’s first cyberattack set the stage for modern cybersecurity challenges

The very first cyberattack clogged up the nascent internet, halting digital communications. Now much bigger, the internet is still largely open to – and suffering regularly from – similar attacks.

By Scott Shackelford

Back in November 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, son of the famous cryptographer Robert Morris Sr., was a 20-something graduate student at Cornell who wanted to know how big the internet was – that is, how many devices were connected to it. So he wrote a program that would travel from computer to computer and ask each machine to send a signal back to a control server, which would keep count.