This YouTube video reminded me of some past experience.
The topic is the Morris Internet worm that swept the world in November 1988. In and of itself the worm wasn’t malicious, but it had a flaw that caused it to over-run a machines resources as it bounced around a network. For more details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
At the time I’d just started to take over the facility system administrator role for the RTP, NC location for Data General. We were connected to the Internet of that time via an IP over X.25 link. Our gateway machine was a small MV series machine (I think), it was an “under the desk” machine. It ran the DG/UX operating system – Data General’s version of Unix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/UX
I had taken vacation and headed to England to see family and friends, and in 1988 you weren’t as connected as you are now. My phone was connected to the wall so it didn’t come with me, and this was the period of “luggables” and not portable or heaven forbid laptops. Remote access was still via banks of modems where 14.4kbits/s was the height of technology. So I didn’t know what was going on until I returned.
But good news – although we had disconnected from our Internet connection we were perfectly safe, since the worm relied on a buffer overflow to execute code, and nobody was writing code targetting MVs and DG/UX – so when we got pinged nothing happened.
I spent a lot of time trouble-shooting modems and hunt groups in those days – I’m not sure I want to call them the good old days, but it kept me employed……
