CH2. THE CORNER PUB

It is not surprising the SPAN security team would miss the mark. It is not surprising, for example, that these officials should to this day be pronouncing the 'Oilz' version of the WANK worm as 'oil zee'. It is also not surprising that they hypothesised the worm's creator chose the word 'Oilz' because the modifications made to the last version made it slippery, perhaps even oily.

Likely as not, only an Australian would see the worm's link to the lyrics of Midnight Oil.

This was the world's first worm with a political message, and the second major worm in the history of the worldwide computer networks. It was also the trigger for the creation of FIRST, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams.¹ FIRST was an international security alliance allowing govern- ments, universities and commercial organisations to share information about computer network security incidents. Yet, NASA and the US Department of Energy were half a world away from finding the creator of the WANK worm. Even as investigators sniffed around electronic trails leading to France,

46