"You mean the INTERNET stuff and Congress losing it's mind?" Tyrone laughed at the thought that Congress would now use their downed computers as an excuse for not doing anything. "Those are only the ones that have made it to the press. It's lot worse." Bob scanned a few pages of the folder and para- phrased while reading. "Ah, yes, the NPRP, National Pretrial Reporting Program over at Justice . . .was hit with a series of computer viruses apparently intentionally placed in VMS comput- ers, whatever the hell those are." Bob Burnson was not computer fluent, but he knew what the Bureau's computer could do. "The Army Supply Center at Fort Stewart, Georgia had all of its requisitions for the last year erased from the computer." Bob chuckled as he continued. "Says here that they have had to pool the guys' money to go to Winn Dixie to buy toilet paper and McDonald's has offered a special GI discount until the system gets back up." "Ty," Bob said. " Some people on the hill have raised a stink since their machines went down. Damn crybabies. So ECCO is being activated." "What the hell is ECCO?" Tyrone asked again. "ECCO stands for Emergency Computer Crisis Organization. It's a computer crisis team that responds to . . .well I guess, comput- er crises." Bob opened the folder again. "It was formed during the, and I quote, ' . . .the panic that followed the first INTER- NET Worm in November of 1988.'" Tyrone's mouth hung open. "What panic?" "The one that was kept under absolute wraps," Bob said, slightly lowering his voice. "At first no one knew what the INTERNET event was about. Who was behind it. Why and how it was happen- ing. Imagine 10's of thousands of computers stopping all at once. It scared the shit out of the National Security Council, remember we and the Russians weren't quite friends then, and we thought that military secrets were being funneled straight to the Kremlin. You can't believe some of the contingency plans I heard about." "I had no idea . . ." "You weren't supposed to," Bob added. "Very few did. At any rate, right afterward DARPA established CERT, the Computer Emer- gency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon, and DCA set up a Security Coordination Center at SRI International to investigate problems in the Defense Data Network. Livermore and the DOE got into the act with Computer Incident Advisory Capability. Then someone decided that the bureaucracy was still too light and it deserved at least a fourth redundant, overlapping and rival group to investigate on behalf of Law Enforcement Agencies. So, there we have ECCO." "So what's the deal?" asked Tyrone. "What do I have to do?"