The Morris Worm had a literary inspiration in the form of John Brunner's 1975 "The Shockwave Rider", one of the earliest depictions of computer hacking [0]. A great book that still stands the test of time.
Agree. I think one of the reasons is that Brunner doesn't actually precisely describe the technology except in terms like 'the home phone service was tied into the net'. This makes it very easy to superimpose our modern perceptions onto a book that is now 45 years old. It's almost less jarring than the mid-80s cyberpunk classics such as Neuromancer with its no-mobile-phones and line-printers-in-space-stations.