WORLD'S FIRST CYBERATTACK?

BACK in November 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, son of famous cryptographer  Robert Morris Sr., was 20-something graduate student at Cornell who wanted to know how big Internet was - that is how many devices were connected to it.

So he wrote a program that would travel from computer to computer and ask each machine to send a signal back to control server, which would keep count.

The program worked well - too well, in fact, Morris had known that if it traveled too fast there might be problems, but the limits he built in weren't enough to keep the program from clogging up large sections of the Internet, both copying itself to new machines and sending those pings back.

When he realized what was happening, even his message warning system administrators about the problem couldn't get through.

His program became the first of a particular type of cyber attack called ''distributed denial of service,'' in which large numbers of  Internet-connected devices, including computers, webcams and other smart gadgets, are told to send lots of traffic to one particular address-

Overloading it with so much activity that either the system shuts down or its network connections are completely blocked.

As the chair of the integrated Indiana University Cybersecurity  Program, I can report that these kinds of attacks are increasingly frequent today.

In many ways, Morris program, known to history as the ''Morris worm,'' set the stage for the crucial, and potentially devastating, vulnerabilities in what I and others have called the coming ''Internet of Everything''.