[1988] You're talking about the 'finger' worm, right? I remember that the manager in charge of the network at the single point of connection to the Atlantic cable actually pulled the plug, literally, when getting notified about the worm. Thereby stopping it before it arrived, and also disconnecting one whole country from major parts of the internet (or possibly several countries, my memory gets fuzzy).

Anyway, what's interesting about that worm is that it could spread only because of the homogenity of Unix systems at that time.. they all (or nearly all) used the exact same code base for the part which the finger worm penetrated. Today the same trick wouldn't have worked, or at least not with the exponential speed increase that shocked even the worm author. Uniformity.. same operating system and applications installled on the vast majority of computers.. does that remind you of something?