Robert Tappan Morris, the 21-year-old Cornell University student who unleashed the first worm attack on the Internet in 1988, has fully rehabilitated his reputation in the computer science community. Today, he is a respected associate professor of computer science at MIT.

Twenty years ago, many in the Internet engineering community wanted to see him punished after the worm he wrote caused around 10 percent of all Internet-connected systems to be knocked off the network.

"I don't think anyone believed that Robert was trying to destroy the Internet," Allman says. "He was young, he was a student, and he screwed up. Most of us screw up when we are young, but our screw-ups didn't make the front page of The New York Times."