Read Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier for Free Online

were simultaneously trying to calm callers and concentrate on developing an analysis of the alien program. Was the thing a practical joke or a time bomb just waiting to go off? Who was behind this?

    NASA was working in an information void when it came to WANK. Some staff knew of the protesters’ action down at the Space Center, but nothing could have prepared them for this. NASA officials were confident enough about a link between the protests against Galileo and the attack on NASA’s computers to speculate publicly that the two were related. It seemed a reasonable likelihood, but there were still plenty of unanswered questions.

    Callers coming into the SPAN office were worried. People at the other end of the phone were scared. Many of the calls came from network managers who took care of a piece of SPAN at a specific NASA site, such as the Marshall Space Flight Center. Some were panicking; others spoke in a sort of monotone, flattened by a morning of calls from 25 different hysterical system administrators. A manager could lose his job over something like this.

    Most of the callers to the SPAN head office were starved for information. How did this rogue worm get into their computers? Was it malicious? Would it destroy all the scientific data it came into contact with? What could be done to kill it?

    NASA stored a great deal of valuable information on its SPAN
    computers. None of it was supposed to be classified, but the data on those computers is extremely valuable. Millions of man-hours go into gathering and analysing it. So the crisis team which had formed in the NASA SPAN project office, was alarmed when reports of massive data destruction starting coming in. People were phoning to say that the worm was erasing files.

    It was every computer manager’s worst nightmare, and it looked as though the crisis team’s darkest fears were about to be confirmed.

    Yet the worm was behaving inconsistently. On some computers it would only send anonymous messages, some of them funny, some bizarre and a few quite rude or obscene. No sooner would a user login than a message would flash across his or her screen:

    Remember, even if you win the rat race--you’re still a rat.

    Or perhaps they were graced with some bad humour: Nothing is faster than the speed of light...

    To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the light comes on.

    Other users were treated to anti-authoritarian observations of the paranoid:

    The FBI is watching YOU.

    or

    Vote anarchist.

    But the worm did not appear to be erasing files on these systems.
    Perhaps the seemingly random file-erasing trick was a portent of things to come--just a small taste of what might happen at a particular time, such as midnight. Perhaps an unusual keystroke by an unwitting computer user on those systems which seemed only mildly affected could trigger something in the worm. One keystroke might begin an irreversible chain of commands to erase everything on that system.

    The NASA SPAN computer team were in a race with the worm. Each minute they spent trying to figure out what it did, the worm was pushing forward, ever deeper into NASA’s computer network. Every hour NASA spent developing a cure, the worm spent searching, probing, breaking and entering. A day’s delay in getting the cure out to all the systems could mean dozens of new worm invasions doing God knows what in vulnerable computers. The SPAN team had to dissect this thing completely, and they had to do it fast.

    Some computer network managers were badly shaken. The SPAN office received a call from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California, an important NASA centre with 6500 employees and close ties to California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

    JPL was pulling itself off the network.

    This worm was too much of a risk. The only safe option was to isolate their computers. There would be no SPAN DEC-based communications with the rest of NASA until the crisis was under control.