"I had been told by my advisors there was no future in applied computer security research," Spafford says. "When this happened, suddenly a whole lot of people realized that the development of systems had leapfrogged the controlled, mainframe environment and a different kind of security model needed to be observed.... We needed a more engineering approach, a more practical approach."

The Great Worm

The Morris worm was the first major worm attack, and it was dubbed "The Great Worm" in a reference to Tolkein.

Previously, researchers had been developing benevolent worms that could be used to automatically install software updates, but no one had launched a malicious worm onto a network in an uncontrolled fashion.

The Morris worm served as a precursor to other well-known worm attacks including 1999's Melissa, 2001's Code Red and 2003's Slammer, all of which targeted systems running software.