Cybersecurity professionals have long grappled with ethical issues. One particularly complex ethical issue is the execution of projects intended to help that end up causing harm instead. This was the case with the first DoS attack, created by Robert Morris in the late ‘80s.
Morris was looking for ways of highlighting security flaws, such as weak passwords. Unfortunately, Morris was too successful with his coding and the worm replicated excessively, causing significant monetary damage and resulting in a major slow-down of the early Internet. Morris has the dubious distinction of being the first person to be charged for computer crimes under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Currently, Morris is a tenured professor at MIT.