In December of 1988, I was invited to speak at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) about the Morris Internet Worm that had been released about six weeks before. The invitation was to speak on computer security in general, malicious software more specifically, and particularly “The Worm."

At the time, I was a new assistant professor — I had joined the faculty at Purdue in August of 1987. This was only my second ever presentation on computing security issues, although I had been working in the area for years. Note, that this was well before I had coauthored either the Computer Virus book or Practical Unix Security.

The title of the talk was Worms, Viruses, and Other Programmed Pests. I went on to give a variant of this presentation about 2 dozen times in the year following this talk.

I had forgotten that I had a copy of this video stored away. I’m sharing it now for historical purposes (and for some of my friends, hysterical purposes).

I think that this talk has aged very well, considering it was given nearly 30 years ago. Most of what I talk about here (but not all) is still relevant. Clearly, a number of the examples and numbers have changed drastically since then, but some of the most significant aspects have remained unchanged. Much of the advice I gave then could be given today because it still applies….and still is largely ignored. Especially, check out the Q&A at the end.

You can tell this video is really old, not only because of the video artifacts, but because:

1. I am wearing a normal tie (I switched to bow ties exclusively a few years later)
2. I am making the presentation using acetates instead of from a computer
3. I have almost a full head of hair
4. I only had a waistline in double digits.

You'll also note that I had the odd sense of humor even then. Oh, and I used the Oxford comma in the title.

Enjoy.

(Direct link to YouTube page here.)