“ I think we might be here for a while,” he said. He very calmly advised me to attend to all my bodily needs right away: get coffee and any needed snacks take a toilet break (at that office, the bathrooms were out in the fire escape and down the stairs a fair way, for some reason) adjust desk and chair for long-term comfort find most ergonomic alignment of keyboard optimise colour settings for screen (computer displays really weren’t that good 20 years ago). I was the second person into work that day, and I was greeted by a early-bird colleague who was wearing one of those conflicted excitement/fear/resignation expressions that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s world of IT, could only mean one thing. On Code Red day, I got to the office nice and early, ready for the sort of problems often left behind on purpose handed over carefully by those of our colleagues in North America who been the last to leave their office. I’d had just enough time to figure out how to use Sydney’s buses and trains (there were no Opal cards back then – bus travel was based on magnetic strips and unintiutive “zone numbers” that turned out to be old British miles in disguise).
I can certainly remember where I was, because I had just – only just! – relocated from Sophos UK to Sophos Australia, where we were in the process of opening up a new threat research lab. That’s because July 2001 is when the infamous Code Red computer worm showed up, spread fast, and all but consumed the internet for several days.
If you were in IT or cybersecurity 20 years ago this week, the answer to that question is almost certainly a big fat “ Yes.” There’s a famous and very catchy song that starts, “ It was 20 years ago today…”īut can you remember where you were and what you were doing 20 years ago, if you’re old enough to have well-formed memories of that period?
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