In the late 1940's, John Von Neumann, developer of the stored program concept, authored a treatise, "Theory and Organization of Complicate Automata", in which he described the theory of what came to be called, the computer virus. He proposed the theory that software can multiply like a biological virus. Several scientists pursued this theory in a few journals, even though most everyone else dismissed the idea. About 10 years later, this radical theory, was brought to life at the highly respected Bell Labs. One of the programmers responsible for this amazing feat was Robert Morris, Sr., the father of the infamous, Robert Morris, Jr., who created the worst infection in the history of the Internet. These programmers, realizing that both programs and data are stored in the same computer memory, proved that programs could be created and destroyed just like data. They created a computer game, in which the programs replicated themselves and destroyed the opposing programs. Because computer memory at that time was referred to as core, this game was later called Core Wars in a Scientific American article.

Although news of this experiment soon spread to researchers at MIT and Xerox, apparently the programmers were able to keep this information from most of the computer community for several years. They were well aware of the disastrous effects this concept could have on a network. As an experiment, Xerox demonstrated how rapidly it could spread through a network, and shut down the system.

Eventually, about 25 years later (in the early 80's) one of the programmers, during an acceptance speech for an award, spoke at length about the experiments. News of this and similar research soon spread and gave birth to the virus menace that computer security experts have been battling ever since.

The history of illegal hacking can be traced back to the early 1950's. At