Of worms and men
When the Morris worm came out, I discovered it on a research VAX I had admin rights to at a large particle-physics laboratory in Switzerland -- no, not that large... (I can't remember if I noticed it myself or got a heads-up from a Usenet newsgroup.) It had got in via one user whose password was the same as his username -- a common practice at the time, hence why the worm was able to spread so easily.
I analysed it and cleaned it up, then sent a warning to the Institute's IT staff. The response from the head of IT was, "WTF are you?" I replied that I was a research physicist at $LARGE_UNIVERSITY who had been carrying out experiments at the Institute for over two years, and in fact was due to start work as a staff scientist there the next month. He started to take me more seriously then, and we became good friends over the next decade.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
