Wednesday, 23. December 1987

Another article on the Christmas Virus [just in time for Xmas]

[In the spirit of the season, I am including this now rather old-hat and somewhat ill-informed note for a few more background details. It is interesting perhaps more for what the press can do to an incident than for the incident itself. Happy holidays to all. RISKS will take some vacation -- unless something really startling happens. PGN]

I have been handed a clipping from the (Toronto) Globe and Mail's "Report on Business" section. I don't have the date, but Texaco Canada Inc. closed at $31, up $4.50, on the other side of the page.

The clipping is of the Quidnunc column by Bud Jorgenson. My !'s in square brackets.

Merry Christmas, Big Blue. The internal system of the world's biggest computer company was disrupted for almost 72 hours by an electronic Christmas card. IBM's public relations department played down the seriousness of the incident, but according to our mole at IBM, "it crippled us".

The computer equivalent of a nuclear meltdown [!] began at a university in West Germany when someone tapped into [!] IBM's Prof (PRofessional OFfice) System with a graphics-laden Christmas message. Whether it was deliberate or a coding error was not clear [!], but the card quickly became a hit and was passed on to various routing systems.

As every computer buff knows, graphics use large bites of memory and this one gobbled up an ever expanding chunk of the Prof System as it multiplied its way through IBM offices. This was a week ago Friday, just before quitting time in Europe and during the first half of the workday on this side of the water.

When the system goes down, IBM simply cannot work because just about everything is dependent on the [!] computer, right down to daily diaries with meeting schedules. By early Monday, the system in Canada was partly restored so that employees could tap into the data base to read files.

But they couldn't use printers or communicate with other offices until the all-clear was sounded, which was after 10 am Eastern time. An IBM spokesman said the impact on operations varied from country to country.

Police work to track down the culprit was turned over to Bitnet and Earn, a pair of computer networks that link universities in North America and Europe. The list of suspects has been narrowed to two at the Technical University of Clausthal, a small town south of Hanover.

Forwarded by Mark Brader, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, utzoo!sq!msb [msb@sq.com (Mark Brader) via risks-digest Volume 5, Issue 83]
23:28 | #

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif