Gracehopper

The computer software routine named for Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, USN – the inventor of electronic computer programming. The cause of the Information Plague of 2229 CE was a small viral software routine started as a prank by a group of information science post doctoral fellows at Carnegie Mellon University. An extremely agile megavirus that emulated Ebola, it was targeted at a competing group in the McNealy-Gates Information Sciences Laboratory. Launched at 13:15:04.13527 UTC, by 13:15:04.13546 UTC the 128 Byte program jumped the university firewall and within an hour brought down every node on InternetXXXI.