📸

had been replaced with a large graphics display woven around the word 'WANK'.⁷ In ordinary characters, the symbolism was explained:

WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS
Your System Has Been Officially WANKed.
You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.

The arrival of the worm coincided with reports of protestors in Florida attempting to disrupt the launch of a nuclear-powered shuttle payload. It is assumed that the worm was also a protest against the launch.

The WANK worm spread itself at a more leisurely rate than the Internet worm, sending out fewer alarms and creating less hysteria. But when Kevin Obermann of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories took it apart, he reported: 'This is a mean bug to kill and could have done a lot of damage.'

The WANK worm had some features that were not present in the Father Christmas worm: to a limited extent it could evolve and mutate, allowing it to become just a little bit smarter as it made its way from machine to machine. In other words, the worm had been designed to mutate deliberately, to add to the problems that might be caused by accidental mutation or by unintentional programming errors. And, by not immediately announcing its presence, it had more time to spread.

A method of combating the worm was developed by Bernard Perrot of the Institut de Physique Nucleaire at Orsay in France. Perrot's scheme was to create a booby-trapped file of the type that the worm could be expected to attack. If the worm tried to use information from the file, it would itself come under attack and be blown up and killed.

By the end of 1989 the prophecies of the computer virus experts seemed to have come true. Now not only were there viruses, but a whole panoply of malicious software to deal with: worms, trojans and even computer bombs.

These bombs are always deliberately damaging and, unlike viruses, don't replicate. They are designed to lay dormant within a computer for a period, then explode at some pre-programmed date or event.⁸

📸