LLNL conducted mostly military research, much of it for the Strategic Defense Initiative. Many LLNL scientists spent their days designing nuclear arms and developing beam weapons for the Star Wars program.9 DOE already had a computer security group, known as CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Capability. But the CIAC team tended to be experts in security issues surrounding Unix rather than VMS-based computer systems and networks. `Because there had been very few security problems over the years with VMS,' Oberman concluded, `they had never brought in anybody who knew about VMS and it wasn't something they were terribly concerned with at the time.' The worm shattered that peaceful confidence in VMS computers. Even as the WANK worm coursed through NASA, it was launching an aggressive attack on DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago. It had broken into a number of computer systems there and the Fermilab people were not happy. They called in CIAC, who contacted Oberman with an early morning phone call on 16 October. They wanted him to analyse the WANK worm. They wanted to know how dangerous it was. Most of all, they wanted to know what to do about it. The DOE people traced their first contact with the worm back to 14 October. Further, they hypothesised, the worm had actually been launched the day before, on Friday the 13th. Such an inauspicious day would, in Oberman's opinion, have been in keeping with the type of humour exhibited by the creator or creators of the worm. Oberman began his own analysis of the worm, oblivious to the fact that 3200 kilometres away, on the other side of the continent, his colleague and acquaintance John McMahon was doing exactly the same thing. Every time McMahon answered a phone call from an irate NASA system or network manager, he tried to get a copy of the worm from the infected machine. He also asked for the logs from their computer systems. Which computer had the worm come from? Which systems was it attacking from the infected site? In theory, the logs would allow the NASA team to map the worm's trail. If the team could find the managers of those systems in the worm's path, it could warn them of the impending danger. It could also alert the people who ran recently infected systems which had become launchpads for new worm attacks. This wasn't always possible. If the worm had taken over a computer and was still running on it, then the manager would only be able to trace the worm backward, not forward. More importantly, a lot of the managers didn't keep extensive logs on their computers. McMahon had always felt it was important to gather lots of information about who was connecting to a computer. In his previous job, he had modified his machines so they collected as much security information as possible about their connections to other computers.