🧬 Creeper, Reaper & Morris: How Three Simple Programs Changed Cybersecurity Forever

👾 The Origins of Viruses (And They Weren’t Even That Evil)

We talk a lot about malware today — ransomware, zero-days, APTs. But did you know the first computer “viruses” weren’t even meant to be harmful? In fact, they were experiments written out of pure curiosity.

Let me introduce you to the OGs of digital chaos:

• 🦠 Creeper – The world’s first computer worm

• 🧹 Reaper – The first antivirus (also kind of a worm)

• 🐛 Morris Worm – The first time the internet really felt a cyberattack

These three little programs — written in the '70s and '80s — laid the foundation for everything we now call cybersecurity.

Let’s break them down.

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🦠 Creeper: The First Worm (1971)

“I’M THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!”

That’s all it did. No stealing files. No deleting data. Just a message.

🧑‍💻 Who made it?

Bob Thomas, an engineer at BBN Technologies.

🧠 Why?

To test if a program could move between computers on ARPANET — the internet before the internet.

⚙️ What did it do?

• It would copy itself to another machine on the network

• Show the message: "I'M THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!"

• Delete itself from the old machine

It didn’t spread wildly. It didn’t break anything. But it was the first program to move like a worm — and that made history.

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🧹 Reaper: The First Antivirus (1972)

Creeper wasn’t dangerous, but someone thought, “What if it was?”

So they wrote Reaper — the first program designed to find and delete Creeper copies across the network.

Funny thing? Reaper spread like a worm too.

🧠 Why is that cool?

Because this was the first time a piece of software was built to hunt and kill another — the start of everything we now call antivirus, EDR, and malware defense.

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🐛 The Morris Worm: When Things Got Real (1988)

“I didn’t mean to break the internet.”
— Robert Tappan Morris

In 1988, a college student named Robert Morris wrote a worm to measure the size of the internet.

Instead, it crashed about 10% of the internet.

💥 What went wrong?

• It used bugs in sendmail, finger, and other services to break in

• It brute-forced passwords

• And it replicated too aggressively — sometimes infecting the same system over and over

⚖️ What happened?

• Robert Morris became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

• The worm caused $100K–$10M in damages (6000 computers were infected in the end)

• It led to the creation of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team)

Basically: the cybersecurity world woke up. Hard.

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🔍 Creeper vs Reaper vs Morris

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🎓 What These Programs Taught Us

Even small programs can have big impacts:

• Creeper showed how code could move — the start of network worms

• Reaper showed how we might fight them

• Morris showed how even good intentions can crash the internet

These weren’t written by criminals. They were curious experiments. But they helped build the entire field of cybersecurity we rely on today.

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🧠 Final Thoughts

The first viruses weren’t evil.
They were art.
They were curiosity.
They were experiments that accidentally changed the digital world.

And today, 50+ years later, we’re still chasing down Creepers and building better Reapers.