The Great Internet Worm
Visually, I suspect this was perhaps my least-successful Focus page. But it was such a good read I chose to let it go anyway. The story was about a 23-year-old Ph.D. student at Cornell who created the first big -- and expensive to fix -- internet worm. I explained what happened, what went wrong and how the worm spread to affected even the Dept. of Defense. I give the punchline at the bottom: That kid served three years of probation and 400 hours of community service and now teaches computer science at MIT. July 24, 2014