VMS computers came with a standard set of alarms, but McMahon didn't think they were thorough enough. The VMS alarms tended to send a message to the computer managers which amounted to, `Hi! You just got a network connection from here'. The modified alarm system said, `Hi! You just got a network connection from here. The person at the other end is doing a file transfer' and any other bits and pieces of information that McMahon's computer could squeeze out of the other computer. Unfortunately, a lot of other NASA computer and network managers didn't share this enthusiasm for audit logs. Many did not keep extensive records of who had been accessing their machines and when, which made the job of chasing the worm much tougher. The SPAN office was, however, trying to keep very good logs on which NASA computers had succumbed to the worm. Every time a NASA manager called to report a worm disturbance, one of the team members wrote down the details with paper and pen. The list, outlining the addresses of the affected computers and detailed notations of the degree of infection, would also be recorded on a computer. But handwritten lists were a good safeguard. The worm couldn't delete sheets of paper. When McMahon learned DOE was also under attack, he began checking in with them every three hours or so. The two groups swapped lists of infected computers by telephone because voice, like the handwritten word, was a worm-free medium. `It was a kind of archaic system, but on the other hand we didn't have to depend on the network being up,' McMahon said. `We needed to have some chain of communications which was not the same as the network being attacked.' A number of the NASA SPAN team members had developed contacts within different parts of DEC through the company's users' society, DECUS. These contacts were to prove very helpful. It was easy to get lost in the bureaucracy of DEC, which employed more than 125000 people, posted a billion-dollar profit and declared revenues in excess of $12 billion in 1989.10 Such an enormous and prestigious company would not want to face a crisis such as the WANK worm, particularly in such a publicly visible organisation like NASA. Whether or not the worm's successful expedition could be blamed on DEC's software was a moot point. Such a crisis was, well, undesirable. It just didn't look good. And it mightn't look so good either if DEC just jumped into the fray. It might look like the company was in some way at fault. Things were different, however, if someone already had a relationship with a technical expert inside the company. It wasn't like NASA manager cold-calling a DEC guy who sold a million dollars worth of machines to someone else in the agency six months ago. It was the NASA guy calling the DEC guy he sat next to at the conference last month. It was a colleague the NASA manager chatted with now and again.