Stockpickr: PC-Security List

In November 1988, I was sitting in Cornell University's computer science lab working on a research project. Next to me, a grad student with bushy, brownish-red hair and glasses had his head down on the table, sleeping, I assumed.

After about a half-hour, I peeked at what he had been writing on his screen. "I miss you" was the only thing written on an open email document.

A few days later, all the computers at Cornell went down. My mother, who at the time was working at Siemens in New Jersey, called to tell me that all of the computers there had crashed and everyone was leaving work early.

In fact, that day, almost all of the computers in the country connected to the Internet went down. It was the first major Internet virus, dubbed "The Internet Worm." It brought down the entire Net pretty much all over the world for a day.

The day after the widespread shutdown, FBI agents were all over the computer science department at Cornell. It turns out the student who had been sleeping at the computer next to me a week earlier, a guy named Robert Morris, had written the Internet worm and unleashed it on the world, causing, as one headline suggested, "$1 billion in lost productivity."

I dispute that dollar estimate, but given the extent to which the Internet has now taken hold over so many aspects of our lives, that figure likely would be much higher if a similar virus were unleashed today to the same effect.

The worm was not a malicious terrorist act as some papers suggested. It turns out it was simply a program gone awry, one never intended to have the harmful effect that it had. And once the furor had died down (Morris was given probation and community service time), the papers went on to pursue other, more important matters.

Even 20 years later, the threat of another large-scale Internet virus taking advantage of hundreds of security loopholes that exist on each of our personal computers remains. In fact, the threat is large enough that it's worthwhile to look at the public companies that stand to benefit from this threat.

To that end, I have set up the Computer Security Index, a portfolio of stocks that I believe are both cheap and good for this security play, regardless of the economy.