The First Worms
Self-replicating code turned a research network into something that could be brought down. The Morris Worm of November 1988 spread further than its author intended and led directly to the founding of CERT, while Cliff Stoll's pursuit of a 75-cent accounting error uncovered an intrusion that ran into 1987.
Part of Cybersecurity
21 moments in this segment.
- — A Bildschirmtext advertisement. A short television advertisement for Bildschirmtext, the interactive online service introduced by the Deutsche Bundespost in 1983 for news, ordering and home banking. It shows how the system was sold to the public shortly before the Chaos Computer Club demonstrated its weaknesses.
- — Computer enthusiasts gather in Hamburg, 1984. Archive television footage of young computer fans meeting at the Bürgerhaus Eidelstedt in Hamburg just after Christmas 1984, described in the report as looking for security holes. It is period footage of the earliest Chaos Computer Club gatherings.
- — The Btx hack on ZDF heute journal. German television reports on the Chaos Computer Club's demonstration against the Bildschirmtext system, in which the club moved about 130,000 marks from a Hamburg savings bank account overnight on 16 to 17 November 1984. The report brought the young club to national attention.
- — Wau Holland at the DAFTA data-protection conference. ZDF's heute journal reports from the eighth DAFTA data protection conference and interviews Wau Holland about the relationship between hackers and data protection. The uploader describes it as probably the first mention of the Chaos Computer Club on German television.
- — Cliff Stoll, who traced the Cuckoo's Egg intrusion. Cliff Stoll, the Berkeley astronomer who chased a 75-cent accounting discrepancy in 1986 and uncovered a KGB-paid West German intruder inside US military networks. His account, The Cuckoo's Egg, is the first real-time narrative of a computer intrusion investigation. Photographed at a security conference in 2017. The subject dates from 1986; the photograph itself is later.
- — The Morris Worm source code on a floppy disk, museum exhibit. The floppy disk holding the source of the Morris Worm, displayed at the Museum of Science in Boston. Released on 2 November 1988, it infected roughly 6,000 machines, about ten percent of the internet, by re-infecting hosts it had already taken. The response created CERT/CC at Carnegie Mellon within weeks. The subject dates from 1988; the photograph itself is later.
- — Robert Tappan Morris. then a Cornell graduate student, who wrote and released the 1988 worm and became the first person convicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was later a co-founder of Y Combinator and an MIT professor. Photographed in 2008. The subject dates from 1988; the photograph itself is later.
- — Boston television news report on the 1988 worm outbreak. A local Boston news report from 1988 covering the computer worm that disrupted machines across the early internet, complete with interviews and stock game footage used to illustrate what a virus was. It is one of the earliest surviving examples of mainstream broadcast television trying to explain malicious code to a general audience.
- — European hackers at the first HOPE. A panel of European hackers, including figures from the Chaos Computer Club and the Dutch Hack-Tic scene, describe their communities to an American audience for the first time. It was recorded at the first Hackers On Planet Earth conference.
- — Wau Holland interviewed in Amsterdam. Chaos Computer Club co-founder Wau Holland is interviewed for Kleurnet television in Amsterdam about hacking, networks and the club's outlook. Holland was the movement's most quoted spokesman until his death in 2001.
- — Wau Holland at the first Chaos Communication Camp. Wau Holland gives his assessment of the first Chaos Communication Camp at Altlandsberg and of what the hacker movement had and had not achieved. The camp established the CCC's outdoor gathering as a fixture.
- — Akte CCC: the history of the Chaos Computer Club. A German documentary tracing the Chaos Computer Club from a group dismissed as freaks in the 1980s to an organisation cited in constitutional court proceedings. It covers the club's shift from stunts to expert testimony.
- — Searching for the authors of the Brain virus. Mikko Hypponen travels to Lahore to find Amjad and Basit Farooq Alvi, the brothers who wrote Brain, the first PC virus, which spread on floppy disks from 1986. It is their first video interview about it.
- — NDR revisits the 1984 Btx hack. A regional television retrospective on the Btx hack thirty years after it happened, revisiting the Hamburg setting and the club members involved. It uses the original 1984 reporting as its source material.
- — Hacker, Freaks und Funktionäre. A German television documentary on the rise of the Chaos Computer Club, from West German hacker culture in the 1980s to the club's later role as a public technical authority. It includes interviews with people around the club through its whole history.
- — Kernel Panic on the Morris worm. Mashable's documentary episode on the 1988 Morris worm, the self-replicating program that knocked a large share of the early internet offline and led to the first conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Made decades later as a retrospective.
- — Computerphile on the first internet worm. Dr Julian Onions recalls being on the network in November 1988 when the Morris worm spread, and what cleaning up after it was like. A first-hand recollection recorded decades later.
- — The Hanover hackers and the KGB. An account of the group of young hackers in Hannover who broke into networked systems and sold material to the Soviet KGB, and of how the astronomer Clifford Stoll picked up their trail. The video lists its sources publicly.
- — United States v. Morris, the case brief. A summary of the 1991 appellate decision in United States v. Morris, the first conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to be tested on appeal, and of what the court held about intent under the statute. The legal aftermath of the 1988 worm.
- — Clifford Stoll and the Berkeley intrusion. A long-form retelling of how an unemployed astronomer working in university IT followed a small accounting discrepancy into an international espionage investigation. It covers the state of computer security in 1986.
- — Tracking the KGB hackers over 75 cents. A French-language documentary on Clifford Stoll's pursuit of an intruder in Lawrence Berkeley's systems during the Cold War, which ended in a West German espionage case. It reconstructs the monitoring work he improvised to follow the connection.
