Code Breakers: The Pioneers Who Invented Cybersecurity

In 1988, a 23-year-old graduate student named Robert Morris released a small program onto the early internet just to see how many computers it could reach. Instead, it spread out of control, crashing about 6,000 computers — roughly 10% of the entire internet at the time. That accident, called the Morris Worm, became the reason the first-ever Computer Emergency Response Team was created. Cybersecurity as a field was born partly from mistakes like this one.

- Who Ada Lovelace was and why she's called the first programmer - How Alan Turing helped break Nazi codes during World War II - What the Morris Worm was and why it changed computer safety forever - Key vocabulary: password, virus, firewall, encryption

In the 1840s, mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote notes about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that was never fully built. She wrote what's considered the first computer program — a set of instructions for the machine to calculate numbers. Lovelace also predicted that machines could someday be used in ways their inventors never intended, an early hint at both the power and risk of computing, over a century before the first real computer existed.

During World War II, Nazi Germany encrypted military messages using a machine called Enigma, which scrambled letters into what looked like random gibberish. British mathematician Alan Turing led a team at Bletchley Park that built a machine called the Bombe to crack Enigma's code. Historians estimate their codebreaking shortened the war by up to two years and saved millions of lives. Turing's work laid groundwork for both modern computing and the science of encryption — scrambling information so only the right person can read it.

On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris released a self-spreading program to test the size of the internet. A bug in his code made it copy itself onto the same computer over and over until machines crashed under the load. About 6,000 of the roughly 60,000 computers connected to the internet at the time were affected, and cleanup costs were estimated between $100,000 and $10 million. Morris became the first person convicted under the newly passed Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Carnegie Mellon University created CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team), the first organization dedicated to responding to internet security threats.