Editing Computer worm (section)

==History==
The first ever computer worm is generally accepted to be a self-replicating version of [[Creeper and Reaper|Creeper]] created by [[Ray Tomlinson]] and Bob Thomas at [[BBN Technologies|BBN]] in 1971 to replicate itself across the [[ARPANET]].<ref name="IEEE">{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xv9UAAAAMAAJ |title=IEEE Annals of the History of Computing |publisher=IEEE Computer Society |year=2005 |volume=27–28 |page=74 |quote=[...]from one machine to another led to experimentation with the ''Creeper'' program, which became the world's first computer virus: a computation that used the network to recreate itself on another node, and spread from node to node. The source code of creeper remains unknown.}}</ref><ref name="Guardian">[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/23/internet-history From the first email to the first YouTube video: a definitive internet history]. Tom Meltzer and Sarah Phillips. ''[[The Guardian]]''. 23 October 2009</ref> Tomlinson also devised the first [[antivirus software]], named [[Reaper (program)|Reaper]], to delete the Creeper program.

The term "worm" was first used in this sense in [[John Brunner (novelist)|John Brunner]]'s 1975 novel, ''[[The Shockwave Rider]]''. In the novel, Nichlas Haflinger designs and sets off a data-gathering worm in an act of revenge against the powerful people who run a national electronic information web that induces mass conformity. "You have the biggest-ever worm loose in the net, and it automatically sabotages any attempt to monitor it. There's never been a worm with that tough a head or that long a tail!"<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |first=John |last=Brunner |title=The Shockwave Rider |location=New York |publisher=Ballantine Books |year=1975 |isbn=978-0-06-010559-4 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/shockwaverider0000brun }}</ref> "Then the answer dawned on him, and he almost laughed. Fluckner had resorted to one of the oldest tricks in the store and turned loose in the continental net a self-perpetuating tapeworm, probably headed by a denunciation group "borrowed" from a major corporation, which would shunt itself from one nexus to another every time his credit-code was punched into a keyboard. It could take days to kill a worm like that, and sometimes weeks."<ref name=":0" />

[[Xerox PARC]] was studying the use of "worm" programs for [[distributed computing]] in 1979.<ref>{{Cite IETF|rfc=2555|title=Internet Meeting Notes 8, 9, 10 & 11 May 1979|page=5|date=17 May 1979|author=J. Postel}}</ref>

On November 2, 1988, [[Robert Tappan Morris]], a [[Cornell University]] computer science graduate student, unleashed what became known as the [[Morris worm]], disrupting many computers then on the Internet, guessed at the time to be one tenth of all those connected.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html#f4n|title=The Submarine|website=www.paulgraham.com}}</ref> During the Morris appeal process, the U.S. Court of Appeals estimated the cost of removing the worm from each installation at between $200 and $53,000; this work prompted the formation of the [[CERT Coordination Center]]<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.cert.org/encyc_article/tocencyc.html |title=Security of the Internet |work=CERT/CC }}</ref> and Phage mailing list.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://securitydigest.org/phage/ |title=Phage mailing list |publisher=securitydigest.org |access-date=2014-09-17 |archive-date=2011-07-26 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110726143040/http://securitydigest.org/phage/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> Morris himself became the first person tried and convicted under the 1986 [[Computer Fraud and Abuse Act]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Dressler |first=J. |title=Cases and Materials on Criminal Law |chapter=United States v. Morris |location=St. Paul, MN |publisher=Thomson/West |year=2007 |isbn=978-0-314-17719-3 }}</ref>

[[Conficker]], a computer worm discovered in 2008 that primarily targeted [[Microsoft Windows]] operating systems, is a worm that employs three different spreading strategies: local probing, neighborhood probing, and global probing.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Zhang |first1=Changwang |last2=Zhou |first2=Shi |last3=Chain |first3=Benjamin M. |date=2015-05-15 |title=Hybrid Epidemics—A Case Study on Computer Worm Conficker |journal=PLOS ONE |language=en |volume=10 |issue=5 |pages=e0127478 |doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0127478 |issn=1932-6203 |pmc=4433115 |pmid=25978309 |bibcode=2015PLoSO..1027478Z |doi-access=free |arxiv=1406.6046 }}</ref> This worm was considered a hybrid epidemic and affected millions of computers. The term "hybrid epidemic" is used because of the three separate methods it employed to spread, which was discovered through code analysis.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Zhang |first1=Changwang |last2=Zhou |first2=Shi |last3=Chain |first3=Benjamin M. |date=2015-05-15 |editor-last=Sun |editor-first=Gui-Quan |title=Hybrid Epidemics—A Case Study on Computer Worm Conficker |journal=PLOS ONE |language=en |volume=10 |issue=5 |pages=e0127478 |doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0127478 |issn=1932-6203 |pmc=4433115 |pmid=25978309 |bibcode=2015PLoSO..1027478Z |doi-access=free |arxiv=1406.6046 }}</ref>