The Internet started as a highly trusted & unprotected environment. And as more of a “prank” the Morris worm was launched & replicated in a fairly harmless manner compared with today’s malware attacks. Still, even the Morris worm created denial of service & overloaded some systems to where some harm was done. It soon was realized that exposing resources publicly will draw the “bad guys” in so that defense software would soon be needed. Please see article below from FBI for more details:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/morris-worm-30-years-since-first-major-attack-on-internet-110218
The Morris Worm — 30 Years Since First Major Attack on the Internet — At around 8:30 p.m. on November 2, 1988, a maliciously clever program was unleashed on the Internet from a computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
This cyber worm was soon propagating at remarkable speed and grinding computers to a halt. “We are currently under attack,” wrote a concerned student at the University of California, Berkeley in an email later that night. Within 24 hours, an estimated 6,000 of the approximately 60,000 computers that were then connected to the Internet had been hit. Computer worms, unlike viruses, do not need a software host but can exist and propagate on their own.
Berkeley was far from the only victim. The rogue program had infected systems at a number of the prestigious colleges and public and private research centers that made up the early national electronic network. This was a year before the invention of the World Wide Web. Among the many casualties were Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, NASA, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The worm only targeted computers running a specific version of the Unix operating system, but it spread widely because it featured multiple vectors of attack. For example, it exploited a backdoor in the Internet’s electronic mail system and a bug in the “finger” program that identified network users. It was also designed to stay hidden.
The worm did not damage or destroy files, but it still packed a punch. Vital military and university functions slowed to a crawl. Emails were delayed for days. The network community labored to figure out how the worm worked and how to remove it. Some institutions wiped their systems; others disconnected their computers from the network for as long as a week. The exact damages were difficult to quantify, but estimates started at $100,000 and soared into the millions.
