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On this day in oil and gas: July 26 - computer fraud

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July 26th 1989 – Robert T. Morris, Jr. becomes the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Morris, a Cornell University Student, had released the world’s first computer worm distributed via the internet causing the first World Wide Web security panic and a reported $100,000–$10,000,000 in damages. Referred to as the ‘Great Worm’ and named after JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring’s monsters Scatha and Glaurung, this first cyber security breach foreshadowed our 2013 digital age.

In 2013 the internet and IT technology have become integral to how the world communicates and does business; from critical infrastructure protection to the daily trading of oil the threat of a major cyber attack have been raised significantly since the time of Morris’s Tolkien Worm!

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