In november 1988 the world woke up to what many thought was an attack against the then young internet. Administrators and network managers arrived to work only to find that all the computers in their care had become unusable slow and unresponsive. Even the old reliable trick of rebooting the systems did not have any effect. The internet was compromised.

An attack such as this had of course been theorised about, but no one had imagined that a threat could pop up seemingly over night and cripple critical infrastructure across an entire continent. Robert Morris would learn this first hand when he the night before executed and released the original copy of what history would dub "The Morris worm" into the wild.

In this talk we turn the clock back to early computer history. From the earliest days of using printers to bypass password security, to the Morris Worm that leveraged insecure architecture and predictable user patterns. These are some fun stories that highlight incidents and what we can still learn from them.