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

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, John McMahon normally spent the day managing the chunk of the SPAN computer network which ran between Goddard’s fifteen to twenty buildings.

    McMahon worked for Code 630.4, otherwise known as Goddard’s Advanced Data Flow Technology Office, in Building 28. Goddard scientists would call him up for help with their computers. Two of the most common sentences he heard were ‘This doesn’t seem to work’ and ‘I can’t get to that part of the network from here’.

    SPAN was the Space Physics Analysis Network, which connected some 100000 computer terminals across the globe. Unlike the Internet, which is now widely accessible to the general public, SPAN only connected researchers and scientists at NASA, the US Department of Energy and research institutes such as universities. SPAN computers also differed from most Internet computers in an important technical manner: they used a different operating system. Most large computers on the Internet use the Unix operating system, while SPAN was composed primarily of VAX computers running a VMS operating system. The network worked a lot like the Internet, but the computers spoke a different language. The Internet ‘talked’ TCP/IP, while SPAN ‘spoke’ DECNET.

    Indeed, the SPAN network was known as a DECNET internet. Most of the computers on it were manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts--hence the name DECNET. DEC built powerful computers.
    Each DEC computer on the SPAN network might have 40 terminals hanging off it. Some SPAN computers had many more. It was not unusual for one DEC computer to service 400 people. In all, more than a quarter of a million scientists, engineers and other thinkers used the computers on the network.

    An electrical engineer by training, McMahon had come from NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer Project, where he managed computers used by a few hundred researchers. Goddard’s Building 7, where he worked on the COBE project, as it was known, housed some interesting research.
    The project team was attempting to map the universe. And they were trying to do it in wavelengths invisible to the human eye. NASA would launch the COBE satellite in November 1989. Its mission was to
    ‘measure the diffuse infrared and microwave radiation from the early universe, to the limits set by our astronomical environment’.6 To the casual observer the project almost sounded like a piece of modern art, something which might be titled ‘Map of the Universe in Infrared’.

    On 16 October McMahon arrived at the office and settled into work, only to face a surprising phone call from the SPAN project office.
    Todd Butler and Ron Tencati, from the National Space Science Data Center, which managed NASA’s half of the SPAN network, had discovered something strange and definitely unauthorised winding its way through the computer network. It looked like a computer worm.

    A computer worm is a little like a computer virus. It invades computer systems, interfering with their normal functions. It travels along any available compatible computer network and stops to knock at the door of systems attached to that network. If there is a hole in the security of the computer system, it will crawl through and enter the system. When it does this, it might have instructions to do any number of things, from sending computer users a message to trying to take over the system. What makes a worm different from other computer programs, such as viruses, is that it is self-propagating. It propels itself forward, wiggles into a new system and propagates itself at the new site. Unlike a virus, a worm doesn’t latch onto a data file or a program. It is autonomous.7

    The term ‘worm’ as applied to computers came from John Brunner’s 1975
    science fiction classic, The Shockwave Rider. The novel described how a rebel computer programmer created a program called ‘tapeworm’ which was released into an omnipotent