About 20 years ago in November 1988, the Morris worm spread through the Internet, taking down thousands of computers. The incident prompted the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency to establish the CERT/CC to coordinate activities to defend against future Internet security problems, and was one of the first media stories to raise public awareness about network security. Security problems with the TCP/IP protocol suite were known (as noted by Steven Bellovin), but the Internet was a closed network for academics and researchers at the time. Spam and malware were minor problems, and the Web had not been invented. Security was understandably not one of the high priority concerns of the Internet designers 20 years ago, but the consequences of an open public Internet are now apparent.
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