The SPAN office called John McMahon again, this time with a more urgent request. Would he come over to help handle the crisis? The SPAN centre was only 800 metres away from McMahon's office. His boss, Jerome Bennett, the DECNET protocol manager, gave the nod. McMahon would be on loan until the crisis was under control. When he got to Building 26, home of the NASA SPAN project office, McMahon became part of a core NASA crisis team including Todd Butler, Ron Tencati and Pat Sisson. Other key NASA people jumped in when needed, such as Dave Peters and Dave Stern. Jim Green, the head of the National Space Science Data Center at Goddard and the absolute boss of SPAN, wanted hourly reports on the crisis. At first the core team seemed only to include NASA people and to be largely based at Goddard. But as the day wore on, new people from other parts of the US government would join the team. The worm had spread outside NASA. It had also attacked the US Department of Energy's worldwide High-Energy Physics' Network of computers. Known as HEPNET, it was another piece of the overall SPAN network, along with Euro-HEPNET and Euro-SPAN. The NASA and DOE computer networks of DEC computers crisscrossed at a number of places. A research laboratory might, for example, need to have access to computers from both HEPNET and NASA SPAN. For convenience, the lab might just connect the two networks. The effect as far as the worm was concerned was that NASA's SPAN and DOE's HEPNET were in fact just one giant computer network, all of which the worm could invade. The Department of Energy keeps classified information on its computers. Very classified information. There are two groups in DOE: the people who do research on civilian energy projects and the people who make atomic bombs. So DOE takes security seriously, as in `threat to national security' seriously. Although HEPNET wasn't meant to be carrying any classified information across its wires, DOE responded with military efficiency when its computer managers discovered the invader. They grabbed the one guy who knew a lot about computer security on VMS systems and put him on the case: Kevin Oberman. Like McMahon, Oberman wasn't formally part of the computer security staff. He had simply become interested in computer security and was known in-house as someone who knew about VMS systems and security. Officially, his job was network manager for the engineering department at the DOE-financed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, near San Francisco.