When the Internet Broke
The Morris Worm and the Dawn of Cybersecurity

About this book:

In November 1988, the internet was a cozy digital village of 60,000 trusted machines—no passwords, no firewalls, no doubt that everyone on the network was a colleague. Then a 23-year-old graduate student named Robert Morris released a few lines of code with a single mathematical error, and within hours the world’s first digital pandemic had crashed thousands of systems from Berkeley to NASA, forcing administrators to physically unplug their computers from the walls.

*When the Internet Broke* plunges you into the sleepless nights that followed: the frantic reverse-engineering of the "ghost in the machine," the FBI’s first hunt for a cyber-criminal, and the landmark trial that tested whether 20th-century law could reach a crime that existed only in electrons. You’ll watch the birth of the CERT Coordination Center, the end of network innocence, and the legal precedents that still govern every ransomware attack and data breach today.

More than a techno-thriller, this is the origin story of modern cybersecurity—told with the pace of a novel and the authority of a definitive history. If you want to understand why your hospital’s records can be held hostage, why critical infrastructure flickers on a hacker’s whim, or why trust is the most dangerous default setting in any system, start here. The night the internet broke is the night our digital world grew up.