Like the IBM Christmas Tree Trojan, it carried a Christmas greeting, and like the Internet Worm, it also targeted Digital Equipment's VAX computers. What later became known as the Father Christmas Worm waited until midnight on December 24th before delivering its message to users on the network: HI HOW ARE YOU? I HAD A HARD TIME PREPARING ALL THE PRESENTS. IT ISNT QUITE AN EASY JOB. IM GETTING MORE AND MORE LETTERS.... NOW STOP COMPUTING AND HAVE A GOOD TIME AT HOME!! MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR. YOUR FATHER CHRISTMAS.
The Father Christmas Worm was considered nothing more than a nuisance, and did no damage. But in October 1989 the SPAN network was hit again, with a worm delivering a protest message. The new worm was a variant of Father Christmas, but this time when users logged in to their systems, they found that their normal opening page had been replaced with a large graphics display woven around the word WANK. In ordinary characters, the symbolism was explained:
WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS Your System Has Been Officially WANKed.
You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.
The arrival of the worm coincided with reports of protestors in Florida attempting to disrupt the launch of a nuclear-powered shuttle payload. It is assumed that the worm was also a protest against the launch.
The WANK Worm spread itself at a more leisurely rate than the lnternet Worm, sending out fewer alarms and creating less hysteria. But when Kevin Obermann, a computer technician at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, took it apart, he reported, "This is a mean bug to kill and could have done a lot of damage."
The WANK Worm had some features that were not present in the Father Christmas Worm: to a limited extent it could evolve and miltate, allowing it to become just a little bit smarter as it made its way from machine to machine. In other words, the worm had been designed to mutate deliberately, to add to the problems that might be caused by accidental mutation or by unintentional programming errors. And, by not immediately announcing its presence, it had more time to spread.
A method for combatting the worm was developed by Bernard Perrot of the Institut de Physique Nucleaire at Orsay, France. Perrot's scheme was to create a booby-trapped file of the type that the worm could be expected to attack. If the worm tried to use information from the file, it would itself come under attack and be blown up and killed.
By the end of 1989 the prophecies of the computer virus experts seemed to have come true. Now not only were there viruses, but there was a whole panoply of malicious software to deal with: worms, trojans, and the programs known as logic bombs.
Bombs are always deliberately damaging but, unlike viruses, don't replicate. They are designed to lay dormant within a computer for a period of time, then explode at some preprogrammed date or event. Their targets vary: some delete or modify files, some zap the hard disk; some even release a virus or a worm when they explode. Their only common feature is the single blast of intentional destruction.
What had started out as simple self-replicating programs had grown into a full-blown threat to computer security. Those who had warned about the potential danger for the past two years were entitled to say, "I told you so."
But the prophecies were self-fulfilling. The choice of the term virus to describe quite unremarkable programs glamorized the mundane; the relentless promotion of the presumed threat put ideas in the minds of potential virus writers; the publicity given the concept ensured that the writer's progeny would become known and discussed. Even if the writer himself remained anony- mous, he would know that his creative offspring would become famous.
The computer underworld is populated with young men (and almost no women), mostly single, who live out their fantasies of power and glory on a keyboard. That some young men find computing a substitute for sexual activity is probably incontrovertible. Just as a handle will often hide a shy and frightened fifteen-year-old, an obsession with computing to the exclusion of all else may represent security for a sexually insecure youngster. The computer is his partner, his handle is his alter ego, and the virus he writes is the child of this alter ego and his partner.
A German virus writer once said, "You feel something wonderful has happened when you've produced one. You've created something that lives. You don't know where it will go or what it will do, but you know it will live on."
