The Shockwave Rider (Brunner, 1975)
loreops culturesecurity
John Brunner's 1975 novel, which describes a self-replicating program moving through a continent-wide computer network and calls it a tapeworm - the origin of the word worm as a category of malicious software.
The researchers who built the first real worms at Xerox PARC in 1979 took the name directly from Brunner, and the term reached the wider world with the Morris worm in 1988. The novel is also strikingly prescient about the politics: a networked society where data brokering, identity and government records are the real terrain of conflict, written before personal computers existed. Fiction supplied this field its vocabulary well before the artifacts arrived.
Also known as: john brunner, tapeworm, first worm in fiction