With Microscope and Tweezers: Acknowledgements

With Microscope and Tweezers:

An Analysis of the Internet Virus of November 1988

Acknowledgements

Many people contributed to our effort to take apart the virus. We would like to thank them all for their help and insights both during the immediate crisis and afterwards.

The MIT team

The MIT group effort encompassed many organizations within the Institute. It included people from Project Athena, the Telecommunications Network Group, the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB), the Laboratory for Computer Science, and the Media Laboratory.

The SIPB's role is quite interesting. It is a volunteer student organization that represents students on issues of the MIT computing environment, does software development, provides consulting to the community, and other miscellaneous tasks. Almost all the members of the MIT team which took apart the virus were members of the SIPB, and the SIPB office was the focus for early efforts at virus catching until people gathered in the Project Athena offices.

Mark W. Eichin (Athena and SIPB) and Stanley R. Zanarotti (LCS and SIPB) led the team disassembling the virus code. The team included Bill Sommerfeld (Athena/Apollo Computer and SIPB), Ted Y. Ts'o (Athena and SIPB), Jon Rochlis (Telecommunications Network Group and SIPB), Ken Raeburn (Athena and SIPB), Hal Birkeland (Media Laboratory), and John T. Kohl (Athena/DEC and SIPB).

Jeffrey I. Schiller (Campus Network Manager, Athena Operations Manager, and SIPB) did a lot of work in trapping the virus, setting up an isolated test suite, and dealing with the media. Pascal Chesnais (Media Laboratory) was one of the first at MIT to spot the virus. Ron Hoffmann (Network Group) was one of the first to notice an MIT machine attacked by finger.

Tim Shepard (LCS) provided information about the propagation of the virus, as well as large amounts of ``netwatch'' data and other technical help.

James D. Bruce (EECS Professor and Vice President for Information Systems) and the MIT News Office did an admirable job of keeping the media manageable and letting us get our work done.

The Berkeley Team

We communicated and exchanged code with Berkeley extensively throughout the morning of 4 November 1988. The team there included Keith Bostic (Computer Systems Research Group, University of California, Berkeley), Mike Karels (Computer Systems Research Group, University of California, Berkeley), Phil Lapsley (Experimental Computing Facility, University of California, Berkeley), Dave Pare (FX Development, Inc.), Donn Seeley (University of Utah), Chris Torek (University of Maryland), and Peter Yee (Experimental Computing Facility, University of California, Berkeley).

Others

Numerous others across the country deserve thanks; many of them worked directly or indirectly on the virus, and helped coordinate the spread of information. Special thanks should go to Gene Spafford (Purdue) for serving as a central information point and providing key insight into the workings of the virus. Don Becker (Harris Corporation) has provided the most readable decompilation of the virus which we have seen to date. It was most helpful.

An attempt was made to provide a review copy of this paper to all people mentioned by name. Most read a copy and many provided useful corrections.

People who offered particularly valuable advice included Judith Provost, Jennifer Steiner, Mary Vogt, Stan Zanarotti, Jon Kamens, Marc Horowitz, Jenifer Tidwell, James Bruce, Jerry Saltzer, Steve Dyer, Ron Hoffmann and many unnamed people from the SIPB Office. Any remaining flaws in this paper are our fault, not theirs.

Special thanks to Bill Sommerfeld for providing the description of the finger attack and its discovery.