Robert Tappan Morris

He later joined the faculty in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received tenure in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

After serving his conviction term, he returned to Harvard to complete his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) under the supervision of H.T. Kung. He finished in 1999.

In 1989, Morris was indicted for violating United States Code Title 18 (18 U.S.C. § 1030), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). He was the first person to be indicted under this act. In December 1990, he was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision. He appealed, but the motion was rejected the following March. Morris' stated motive during the trial was "to demonstrate the inadequacies of current security measures on computer networks by exploiting the security defects [he] had discovered." He completed his sentence as of 1994.

Morris' computer worm was developed in 1988, while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. He released the worm from MIT, rather than from Cornell. The worm exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems, including:

Morris grew up in the Millington section of Long Hill Township, New Jersey, and graduated from Delbarton School in 1983.

Robert Tappan Morris (born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet.

Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris (cryptographer) and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA).