I 'member when they blamed a couple of Aussies for "WANK" back in the olden days of DECnet. People have even tried to claim Assange had something to do with it, but that was many years later and just plain silly talk. Poor NASA didn't have any idea what to do. As far as worms go, it was rather rudimentary but it was effective for the day.
One of the first malicious ones I remember was Morris. Ah, that was a delightful example. It was kinda malicious, but mostly harmless. Well, kinda harmless... The feds rolled into MIT all gung ho but entirely clueless. It wasn't even anyone at MIT's fault, it was some dude at Cornell.
Anyhow, I am innocent of all charges.
Once upon a time, it was the Wild West. I have to say, it wasn't necessarily better back then, but it was definitely a time of learning. Even back then, the easiest hacks were social engineering hacks - and literally (figuratively) nobody knew a darned thing about security. You could call the switchboard and tell them you're Bob from accounting and can't login, and they'd happily tell you the password. Of course, there wasn't a world wide web, you'd be dialing into their mainframe directly, but there were all sorts of ways around paying long distance at the time - which was obscenely expensive and stealing long distance was justified.
Seriously, it was like $7 a minute to call across the country. That's absurd - and not adjusted for inflation. I ain't paying that. They can eff right off.
