Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontierDreyfus, Suelette
Science
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier
Dreyfus, Suelette
Computer crimes -- Australia; Computer hackers -- Australia -- Biography; Computer security -- Australia
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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