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. ...