Seconds later the Help Desk received a call from another user with the same problem. Then the switchboard lit up. There were callers from all over the company, all with the same complaint: their computers were making odd noises. It may be a tune, one of the callers added helpfully, coming from the computer's small internal speaker. The sixth caller recognized the melody. The computers were all playing tinny renditions of "Yankee Doodle."
To the specialists in the technical-support department, the discovery that the tune was "Yankee Doodle" was confirmation that they had been hit by a virus, and a well-known one at that. The Yankee Doodle virus had first been seen in 1989 and was said to be relatively harmless. There are a number of variants of the bug but most simply cause computers to play "Yankee Doodle." This particular variant, known as Version 44, played the tune at five P.M. every eight days.
The company arranged for antiviral software to be shipped overnight by Federal Express. The publishers of the software assured the Help Desk that they would simply need to run the program on the computers to locate the infected files and kill the virus; the files wouldn't be damaged and no data would be lost. Yankee Doodle was a nuisance, they said, but not a major problem.
On Friday morning the technical-support staff began the timeconsuming task of checking every computer in the company. They discovered that eighteen of their machines had been hit by the virus and that the killer function of the software they had just bought wouldn't work on their particular variant of Yankee Doo- dle. Instead, to clean the bug out, they would need to delete all infected files and replace them.
The virus they were fighting is generally transferred by diskette. It attaches itself to an executable file--a word-processing program or a game, for instance--then, once loaded on to a computer, it searches out other programs to infect. It is generally harmless in that it never attacks data files, the ones users actually work on, so it can't cause serious damage. Its nuisance value comes in eradicating it: deleting programs and then replacing them can be time-consuming.
In the meantime, to stop the virus from spreading any farther, the company decided to shut down the entire network of 1,500 computers, leaving machines and staff idle. The technical-support specialists estimated that killing the bug and replacing the programs would take them two or three hours at the most. But by mid-afternoon they realized that they had underestimated the size of the job, and arranged to come in over the weekend. In the end, the technical staff worked for four days, Friday through Monday, before they were satisfied that all the machines were free of the virus. During that time computers and staff were inactive, neither processing work in progress nor going ahead with anything else.
The computers worked well for the next three days, but then, at ten A.M. on Thursday, July 4th, the virus was rediscovered. In a routine scan of one of the computers with the new antiviral software, one member of a small crew working over the Independence Day holiday received a big shock: Yankee Doodle was back.
The technical specialists, called into the offices from their homes, discovered to their horror that this time 320 machines had been infected and when they asked the maker of the antiviral software for an explanation, they were simply told, "You missed a spot.
The company was forced to shut ctown Its Computers again, and again staff and machinery sat idle while the support staff searched laboriously through every program on all 1,500 machines. There was no damage: the bug was eradicated and the programs reinstalled without even a byte of data lost. But the lack of damage disguised the virus's real cost in downtime. By the time Yankee Doodle had been completely eradicated, the company had suffered one week of lost production, one week in which 1,500 staff were idle, one week of irrecoverable business. The company never quantified its loss, but it is estimated to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars--all from what was purported to be a harmless virus.
