Although many of Stuxnet’s methods were entirely modern and unique, it owes its roots to the Morris worm and shares some characteristics with it. Morris unleashed his worm in 1988 on the ARPAnet, a communications network built by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, which was the precursor to the internet. Like Stuxnet, the worm did a number of things to hide itself, such as placing its files in memory and deleting parts of itself once they were no longer needed to reduce its footprint on a machine.
