The Internet is sometimes capable of working. It can go down and has; the Morris worm wasn't even malicious (according to Morris). Designs for 'Warhol worms' which do the same thing in just a few minutes have been floating around since the mid-nineties - it's just that botnets are more profitable. And even inadvertent mistakes can cripple lots of functionality.
"It has been proved that the scale-free network is robust to random failures but vulnerable to malicious attacks."
In the real world, malicious attacks are just as valid a source of failure as randomness. (It doesn't matter why the patient dies if he dies.)
Neither Morris worm nor any other worms caused long term damage to the Internet.
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.