A ransomware attack doesn’t announce itself with sirens. It starts with something small-a frozen screen, an error message, a file that won’t open. By the time most organizations realize what’s happening, they’ve already lost precious time.
The first 60 minutes after a breach begins are the most critical. What happens in that window often determines whether an incident becomes a manageable problem or a catastrophic failure.
Here’s what actually happens-minute by minute-when ransomware hits an organization that isn’t prepared.
It was approaching midnight on a Sunday when the emergency room called. The charting system was down. What happened next would determine whether a 100-bed community hospital in Florida’s panhandle would become another ransomware statistic-or a story of disaster averted.
Jamie Hussey had been IT director at Jackson Hospital in Marianna, Florida, for over 25 years. That Sunday night in January 2022, he got a call from the emergency room: they couldn’t connect to the charting system that doctors use to look up patients’ medical histories.
Hussey investigated and quickly realized this wasn’t a routine technical glitch. The charting software, maintained by an outside vendor, was infected with ransomware. And he didn’t have much time to keep it from spreading.
On November 2, 1988, at 8:30 PM, a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris had a simple question: How big is the internet?
To find out, he wrote 99 lines of code—a self-replicating program designed to quietly count computers on the network. He released it from an MIT computer (to hide his tracks) and went to dinner.
By the time he got back, he’d accidentally crashed 10% of the entire internet.
Internet Worm – decompilation:Photo courtesy Intel Free Press.
What Happened
Within 24 hours, about 6,000 of the 60,000 computers connected to the internet were grinding to a halt. Harvard, Stanford, NASA, and military research facilities were all affected. Vital functions slowed to a crawl. Emails were delayed for days.
The problem? A bug in Morris’s code. The worm was supposed to check if a computer was already infected before copying itself. But Morris worried administrators might fake infection status to protect their machines. So he programmed it to copy itself anyway 14% of the time—regardless of infection status.
The result: computers got infected hundreds of times over, overwhelmed by endless copies of the same program.
“We are currently under attack,” wrote a panicked UC Berkeley student in an email that night.
A VAX 11-750 at the University of the Basque Country Faculty of Informatics, 1988—the same year the Morris Worm struck. VAX systems running BSD Unix were primary targets. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The Aftermath
The Morris Worm caused an estimated $100,000 to $10 million in damages. Morris became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, receiving three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $10,000 fine.
But here’s the thing—Morris didn’t have malicious intent. He genuinely just wanted to measure the network’s size. His creation accidentally became the first major wake-up call for internet security.
The incident led directly to the creation of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and sparked the development of the modern cybersecurity industry. The New York Times even used the phrase “the Internet” in print for the first time while reporting on it.
Why November 30th?
In direct response to the Morris Worm, the Association for Computing Machinery established Computer Security Day just weeks later. They chose November 30th specifically—right before the holiday shopping season—because cybercriminals love exploiting busy, distracted people.
That advice is even more relevant 37 years later.
The “1977 Trinity”: Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80. Byte Magazine retrospectively named these three computers the pioneers of personal computing. When the Morris Worm struck in 1988, most people had never heard of “the internet.”
1988 vs. 2025: A Quick Comparison
Consider how things have changed:
Then: 60,000 computers connected to the internet. Now: Over 15 billion devices.
Then: Total damage from Morris Worm: $100K-$10M. Now: Average cost of a single data breach: $4.44 million.
Then: Attack motivation was curiosity. Now: 97% of attacks are financially motivated.
Yet some things haven’t changed. The Morris Worm exploited weak passwords and unpatched systems—the same vulnerabilities that cause most breaches today.
The entire internet in 1977—just a handful of connected institutions. By 1988, this had grown to 60,000 computers. Today: over 15 billion devices. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
What This Means for You
Computer Security Day isn’t just history—it’s a reminder that the basics still work:
• Multi-factor authentication stops 99.9% of account compromises
• Regular, tested backups can save your business from ransomware
• Employee training dramatically reduces successful phishing attacks
And yes—the holiday season really is prime time for attacks. Stay vigilant through January.
One More Thing
Robert Morris never went to prison. After completing his sentence, he co-founded Y Combinator (the startup accelerator behind Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit) and became a tenured professor at MIT—the same school where he launched his infamous worm.
In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery—the organization that created Computer Security Day in response to his attack.
The lesson? The person who exposed the internet’s greatest vulnerabilities is now part of the establishment working to secure it. Threats evolve. Defenses must evolve too.
Your employees aren’t trying to sabotage your company. They’re just trying to be productive.
A Google engineer copies a few lines of proprietary code into ChatGPT to debug a problem. A Samsung employee pastes semiconductor design specifications into a prompt, asking the AI to help optimize performance. A healthcare administrator shares a de-identified patient dataset (they think) to train an AI model for internal use. A financial analyst includes client account numbers in a spreadsheet she uploads to an AI tool for analysis.
A finance manager at a multinational company joins what appears to be a routine video conference. On screen: the CFO and several other executives. They need urgent approval for a $25 million transfer. The faces are familiar. The voices match. The urgency seems reasonable.
The transfer is approved. Days later, the company discovers the truth: every person on that video call was an AI-generated deepfake. The $25 million is gone.
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It happened in 2024. And according to Keepnet Labs research, more than 10 percent of companies have now experienced attempted or successful deepfake fraud, with losses from successful attacks reaching as high as 10 percent of annual profits.
For healthcare organizations, life sciences companies, and nonprofits operating on tight margins, you’re not immune. You’re actually more vulnerable.
You’ve secured the perimeter. You’ve hardened your network. You’ve implemented sophisticated threat detection. You’re protected.
But what about the threats already inside your organization?
Insider threats represent one of the most damaging and least understood cybersecurity risks. They’re not always malicious. They can be negligent employees, disgruntled team members, or sophisticated bad actors embedded within your organization.
The financial impact is staggering: insider threats cost organizations an average of 15.38 million per incident—more than twice the cost of external breaches.
And the worst part? Most organizations have minimal detection and prevention capabilities.
You’ve invested heavily in your own security. You have firewalls, endpoint protection, and a strong incident response team. You’re protected.
Then a vendor you work with gets breached, and your organization becomes the next victim.
Supply chain attacks have become the preferred method for sophisticated threat actors. Why? Because it’s easier to compromise a smaller vendor than attack a hardened enterprise directly. Vendors become the backdoor into your organization, and by the time you discover the compromise, the damage is already done.
Ransomware attacks have evolved. They’re no longer just about encryption and extortion. Modern ransomware campaigns combine encryption, data exfiltration, and multi-stage attacks designed to maximize pressure and financial extraction.
And yet, most organizations have no documented recovery plan specific to ransomware scenarios.
The assumption is simple: “If we have backups, we can recover.” The reality is far more complex—and far more dangerous.
You have cyber insurance. You’re protected, right?
Not necessarily.
Many business leaders make a critical assumption: cyber insurance will cover the costs of a breach. In reality, cyber insurance policies are filled with exclusions, conditions, and requirements that can leave you exposed precisely when you need protection most.
The worst time to discover gaps in your coverage is after a breach occurs. By then, it’s too late.
When the alarm sounds, every minute counts. The difference between managing a breach and experiencing catastrophic operational collapse comes down to one thing: a tested, documented incident response plan.
Most leaders underestimate this critical gap. They have security tools in place, but when an actual attack occurs, the response is chaotic, costly, and often extends the damage exponentially. A company without a practiced incident response plan can face days of downtime, millions in recovery costs, and permanent reputational damage.
Here’s the reality: The average incident response time for unprepared organizations is 287 days. For organizations with a documented, tested plan? 24 days. That’s a tenfold difference in exposure, damage scope, and financial impact.
