Time was once derided as the publication "for those that can't think" (its sister publication, Life, was said to be "for those who can't read"). It has been accused of publishing middle-brow analyses and overwrought cover stories, and its ability to be out of touch has been so noticeable that in show business the offer of a Time cover story is considered a sure sign that the unfortunate star's career is on the wane. Not that anyone has ever turned down a cover story--Time is still one of the most influential publications in America, and for better or worse, what it says is often believed.
So, when Time headlined its cover about computer viruses "Invasion of the Data Snatchers!" its readers were more than certain that data was indeed being snatched. The magazine detailed an attack on a local newspaper office by the Brain virus, and called it a "deliberate act of sabotage." Brain, Time said, was "pernicious," "small but deadly," and "only one of a swarm of infectious programs that have descended on U.S. computer users this year." The magazine also announced, "In the past nine months, an estimated 250,000 computers have been hit with similar contagions."
The article captured perfectly the hyperbole about viruses: Brain was far from pernicious, and it certainly wasn't deadly. There was no swarm of viruses: the number then proven to have infected systems--as opposed to those conjured up in the imaginations of virus researchers--was probably less than ten. And as for the estimate that 250,000 computers had been hit by viruses, it was just that-- an estimate. No one at the time had any real idea how many computer sites had been affected.
The Time writer also dug deep to unearth the Cookie Monster, which had appeared during the 1970s at a number of American colleges. Inspired by a character on the children's television show Sesame Street, this joke program displayed a message on a computer screen: I WANT A COOKIE. If the user typed in "cookie," it would disappear, but, if the message was ignored, it kept reappearing with increasing frequency, becoming ever more insistent. But the Cookie Monster wasn't a virus, even in the broadest definition of the term: it was a joke program introduced by a prankster on a single computer; it had no ability to replicate and it couldn't travel surreptitiously from machine to machine.
Time did recognize that "the alarm caused by these . . . viruses was amplified by two groups with a vested interest in making the threat seem as dramatic as possible"--the computer security specialists and the computer press, "a collection of highly competitive weekly tabloids that have seized on the story like pit bulls, covering every outbreak with breathless copy and splashy head- lines." It was an apt description of the exaggerated coverage of the virus phenomenon. But the threat would soon become real.
On the evening of November 2, 1988, a little over five weeks after the Time story appeared, events occurred that seemed to fulfill all of the doomsday prophecies. Between 5:00 and 6:00 P.M., eastern standard time, on that Wednesday night, a rogue program was loaded onto the ARPANET system. Three hours later, across the continent at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, operators noticed that their computers were running down. Something was taking up computer space and slowing the machines to a crawl. At 10:54 P-M- managers at the University of California at Berkeley discovered what they thought was a hacker trying to break into their systems. As the attempts continued and the attacks increased, they realized to their horror that it wasn't a hacker. It was a program, and it was multiplying.
By that time the same program was attacking the computer at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as well as sites at Purdue, Princeton, and Stanford. It was moving across networks, spreading from the ARPANET onto MILNET--the Department of Defense computer network--and then onto Internet, which itself links four hundred local area networks. It spread to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then to the University of Maryland, then across the country again to the University of California campus at San Diego, and then into the NASA Ames Laboratory, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Within a few hours the entire Internet system was under siege. Peter Yee, at Ames, posted the first warning on the network's electronic mail service at 2:28 A.M.: "We are currently under attack from an Internet virus. It has hit UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA, Ames . . ."
