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

invader’s seven printed pages of source code trying to figure out exactly what the thing did.

    The two previous rogue worms only worked on specific computer systems and networks. In this case, the WANK worm only attacked VMS computer systems. The source code, however, was unlike anything McMahon had ever seen. ‘It was like sifting through a pile of spaghetti,’ he said.
    ‘You’d pull one strand out and figure, "OK, that is what that thing does." But then you’d be faced with the rest of the tangled mess in the bowl.’

    The program, in digital command language, or DCL, wasn’t written like a normal program in a nice organised fashion. It was all over the place. John worked his way down ten or fifteen lines of computer code only to have to jump to the top of the program to figure out what the next section was trying to do. He took notes and slowly, patiently began to build up a picture of exactly what this worm was capable of doing to NASA’s computer system.
    [ ]

    It was a big day for the anti-nuclear groups at the Kennedy Space Center. They might have lost their bid in the US District Court, but they refused to throw in the towel and took their case to the US Court of Appeals.

    On 16 October the news came. The Appeals Court had sided with NASA.

    Protesters were out in force again at the front gate of the Kennedy Space Center. At least eight of them were arrested. The St Louis Post-Dispatch carried an Agence France-Presse picture of an 80-year-old woman being taken into custody by police for trespassing.
    Jane Brown, of the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice, announced,
    ‘This is just ... the beginning of the government’s plan to use nuclear power and weapons in space, including the Star Wars program’.

    Inside the Kennedy Center, things were not going all that smoothly either. Late Monday, NASA’s technical experts discovered yet another problem. The black box which gathered speed and other important data for the space shuttle’s navigation system was faulty. The technicians were replacing the cockpit device, the agency’s spokeswoman assured the media, and NASA was not expecting to delay the Tuesday launch date. The countdown would continue uninterrupted. NASA had everything under control.

    Everything except the weather.

    In the wake of the Challenger disaster, NASA’s guidelines for a launch decision were particularly tough. Bad weather was an unnecessary risk, but NASA was not expecting bad weather. Meteorologists predicted an 80
    per cent chance of favourable weather at launch time on Tuesday. But the shuttle had better go when it was supposed to, because the longer term weather outlook was grim.

    By Tuesday morning, Galileo’s keepers were holding their breath. The countdown for the shuttle launch was ticking toward 12.57 p.m. The anti-nuclear protesters seemed to have gone quiet. Things looked hopeful. Galileo might finally go.

    Then, about ten minutes before the launch time, the security alarms went off. Someone had broken into the compound. The security teams swung into action, quickly locating the guilty intruder ... a feral pig.

    With the pig safely removed, the countdown rolled on. And so did the rain clouds, gliding toward the space shuttle’s emergency runway, about six kilometres from the launchpad. NASA launch director Robert Sieck prolonged a planned ‘hold’ at T minus nine minutes. Atlantis had a 26-minute window of opportunity. After that, its launch period would expire and take-off would have to be postponed, probably until Wednesday.

    The weather wasn’t going to budge.

    At 1.18 p.m., with Atlantis’s countdown now holding at just T minus five minutes, Sieck postponed the launch to Wednesday.
    [ ]

    Back at the SPAN centre, things were becoming hectic. The worm was spreading through more and more systems and the phones were beginning to ring every few minutes. NASA computers were getting hit all over the place.

    The SPAN project staff needed more arms. They