UNDERGROUND

big day. On Christmas morning, it woke up and set to work with great enthusiasm. Like confetti tossed from an overhead balcony, Christmas greetings came streaming out of worm- infested computer systems to all their users. No-one within its reach went without a Christmas card. Its job done, the worm evaporated. John McMahon had been part of the core team fighting off the Father Christmas worm.

At about 4 p.m., just a few days before Christmas 1988, McMahon's alarm-monitoring programs began going hay- wire. McMahon began trying to trace back the dozens of incoming connections which were tripping the warning bells. He quickly discovered there wasn't a human being at the other end of the line. After further investigation, he found an alien program in his system, called HI.COM. As he read the pages of HI.COM code spilling from his line printer, his eyes went wide. He thought, This is a worm! He had never seen a worm before.

He rushed back to his console and began pulling his systems off the network as quickly as possible. Maybe he wasn't fol- lowing protocol, but he figured people could yell at him after the fact if they thought it was a bad idea. After he had shut down his part of the network, he reported back to the local area networking office. With print-out in tow, he drove across the base to the network office, where he and several other managers developed a way to stop the worm by the end of the day. Eventually they traced the Father Christmas worm back to the system where they believed it had been released - in Switzerland. But they never discovered who created it.

Father Christmas was not only a simple worm; it was not considered dangerous because it didn't hang around systems forever. It was a worm with a use-by date.

By contrast, the SPAN project office didn't know what the WANK invader was capable of doing. They didn't know who had written or launched it. But they had a copy of the program. Could McMahon have a look at it?

An affable computer programmer with the nickname