How did a Cornell graduate student's 99-line bootstrap program in November 1988 infect roughly 6,000 machines

On the evening of 2 November 1988, a worm written by a 23-year-old student slipped onto the ARPANET and multiplied until administrators at MIT, Berkeley and NASA were pulling cables from walls. Within a week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had funded the first Computer Emergency Response Team.

By How It Works · Aug 6, 2026