HEADLINES:  "COMPUTER 'VIRUS' CRIPPLES DEFENSE COMPUTER SYSTEM"
DATE:       Friday - November 4, 1988
SOURCE:     The Detroit Free Press by John Markoff; New York Times
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     "A  nationwide Department of Defense data network has  been  dis-   
rupted  by a rapidly spreading ""virus"" software  program  apparently 
introduced by a computer science student's experiment.
     The  program  reproduced  itself through  the  computer  network, 
making  hundreds  of copies in each machine  it  reached,  effectively 
clogging   systems  linking  thousands  of  military,  corporate   and 
university computers around the country and preventing them from doing 
additional work.
     The  virus, which was discovered Wednesday night, is not  thought 
to  have destroyed any files.  But computer security experts aide  the 
episode  illustrated the vulnerability of computer systems,  and  that 
similar incidents could happen repeatedly if awareness about  computer 
security risks was not heightened.
     ""This  wa an accident waiting to happen; we deserved it,""  said 
Geoffrey  Goodfellow,  president of Anterior Technology  Inc.  and  an 
expert on computer communications.
     By  late  Thursday  afternoon,  computer  security  experts  were 
calling the virus the largest assault ever on the nation's computers.
     ""The big issue is that a relatively benign software program  can 
virtually bring our computing community to its knees and keep it there 
for some time,"" said Chuck Cole, deputy computer security manager  at 
the  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.,  one 
of the sites affected.  ""The cost is going to be staggering.""
     The   affected  computers  carry  routine  communications   among 
military officials, researchers and corporations.
     Although  some sensitive military data re involved, the  nation's 
most  sensitive  secret information, such as that on  the  control  of 
nuclear weapons, is thought not to have been touched.
     Computer  viruses  are  so named because  they  parallel  in  the 
computer  world  the  behavior of biological viruses.  A  virus  is  a 
program, or a set of instructions to a computer, that is planted on  a 
floppy disk meant to be used with the computer or introduced when  the 
computer is communicating over phone lines or data networks with other 
computers.
     The  programs  can copy themselves into the master  software,  or 
operating  system.  From  there, the program can  be  passed  to  more 
computers.
     Depending upon the intent of the software's creator, the  program 
might cause a provocative but otherwise harmless message to appear  on 
the screen.  Or it could systematically destroy data in the computer's 
memory.
     The virus program might have been the result of an experiment  by 
a  computer science graduate student trying to sneak a harmless  virus 
into  the  Arpanet computer network, which is  used  by  universities, 
military  contractors  and the Pentagon, where  the  software  program 
would remain undetected.
     A man who said he was an associate of the student said in a  call 
to  the  New  York Times that the experiment went awry  because  of  a 
programming  mistake  that  caused the virus to  multiply  around  the 
military network hundreds of times faster than had been planned.
     The  caller, who refused to identify himself or  the  programmer, 
said  the  student  realized his error and was now  terrified  of  the 
consequences.
     A  spokesman  at the Pentagon's  Defense  Communications  Agency, 
which  has set up an emergency center to deal with the  problem,  said 
the caller's story was a ""plausible explanation of the events.""
     As  the  virus spread Wednesday night, computer experts  began  a 
huge struggle to eradicate the invader.
     ""A virus has been identified in several host computers  attached 
to  the  Arpanet  and the unclassified portion  of  the  defense  data 
network  known  as  the Milnet,"" the  Defense  Communications  Agency 
spokesman said.
     He  said that corrections to the security flaws exploited by  the 
virus are now being developed.
     There were reports of the virus at hundreds of locations on  both 
coasts,   including  computers  at  the  Massachusetts  Institute   of 
Technology; Harvard University; Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland; 
NASA's  Ames  Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.,  and  Lawrence 
Livermore."

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