10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

projects and the people who make atomic bombs. So DOE takes security seriously, as in ‘threat to national security’ seri- ously. Although HEPNET wasn’t meant to be carrying any classified information across its wires, DOE responded with military efficiency when its computer managers discovered the invader. They grabbed the one guy who knew a lot about computer security on VMS systems and put him on the case: Kevin Oberman.

Like McMahon, Oberman wasn’t formally part of the computer security staff. He had simply become interested in computer security and was known in-house as someone who knew about VMS systems and security. Officially, his job was network manager for the engineering department at the DOE-financed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, near San Francisco.

LLNL conducted mostly military research, much of it for the Strategic Defense Initiative. Many LLNL scientists spent their days designing nuclear arms and developing beam weapons for the Star Wars program.9 DOE already had a computer security group, known as CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Capab- ility. But the CIAC team tended to be experts in security issues surrounding Unix rather than VMS-based computer systems and networks. ‘Because there had been very few security problems over the years with VMS,’ Oberman concluded, ‘they had never brought in anybody who knew about VMS and it wasn’t some- thing they were terribly concerned with at the time.’

The worm shattered that peaceful confidence in VMS com- puters. Even as the WANK worm coursed through NASA, it was launching an aggressive attack on DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago. It had broken into a number of computer systems there and the Fermilab people were not happy. They called in CIAC, who contacted Oberman with an early morning phone call on 16 October. They wanted him to analyse the WANK worm. They wanted to know how dangerous it was. Most of all, they wanted to know what to do about it.