Signals :: Topics
Self-replicating code from Elk Cloner forward. The Brain virus, the Morris worm, Dark Avenger's polymorphism, the people who wrote the malware that defined each era.
Four years before the Alvi brothers wrote Brain in Lahore, a fifteen-year-old in Pittsburgh wrote a self-replicating program that would copy itself onto every Apple II floppy in his social circle and, on the fiftieth boot, display a poem. This is the story of the first computer virus that actually got loose.
Ripper :: April 18, 2026 :: 8 min read
In 1986, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi wrote a piece of code to protect their medical software from piracy. It became the first virus to infect IBM PCs, and it carried their real names, address, and phone number.
Ripper :: April 14, 2026 :: 12 min read
On November 2, 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a self-replicating program that brought a meaningful fraction of the early internet to a halt within hours. He became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He also became, eventually, an MIT professor, a Y Combinator cofounder, and the rare cautionary-tale figure whose second act overshadowed the cautionary tale.
nullbyte :: April 12, 2026 :: 10 min read
Robert Tappan Morris released the first internet worm in 1988. A coding error turned an experimental network measurement into a weapon that crashed 10% of the internet and changed everything. The son of an NSA cryptographer. The first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
nullbyte :: March 30, 2026 :: 6 min read
nullbyte :: December 12, 2025 :: 6 min read