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

it. The creator's motives were never clear and, if it had been politically inspired, no-one took credit.

The WANK worm left a number of unanswered questions in its wake, a number of loose ends which still puzzle John McMahon. Was the hacker behind the worm really protesting against NASA's launch of the plutonium-powered Galileo space probe? Did the use of the word 'WANK' — a most un-Amer- ican word — mean the hacker wasn't American? Why had the creator recreated the worm and released it a second time? Why had no-one, no political or other group, claimed responsibility for the WANK worm?

One of the many details which remained an enigma was contained in the version of the worm used in the second attack. The worm's creator had replaced the original process name, NETW_, with a new one, presumably to thwart the anti-WANK program. McMahon figured the original process name stood for 'netwank' — a reasonable guess at the hacker's intended meaning. The new process name, however, left everyone on the SPAN team scratching their heads: it didn't seem to stand for anything. The letters formed an unlikely set of initials for someone's name. No-one recognised it as an acronym for a saying or an organisation. And it certainly wasn't a proper word in the English language. It was a complete mystery why the creator of the WANK worm, the hacker who launched an invasion into hundreds of NASA and DOE computers, should choose this weird word.

The word was 'OILZ'.