Chapter 11

Roger could not move. His heart throbbed and he felt ill. He stood there for some seconds while his brain was working out a new scheme. He quickly turned around and faced the security guard who had grabbed his arm.

"Hey! What the heck is this?! Do you attack all your customers like this?"

"Remain calm and you won't be hurt."

"Hurt?! I just wanted to have this portable repaired!"

"Oh, I'm sorry sir. There seems to have been something wrong with the security system. It seems that your portable have not had its security pad removed. Where did you buy it?"

"Ehrm.. Let me see.. Oh, yes, I bought it at Fujomaki's"

"Well, that explains it. They're kinda sloppy when it comes to security. I hope you can forget about this.. We're really sorry to have embarrased you like this."

"That's allright. Now I'll never visit this store again for sure."


Roger walked out as the grid opened. He slammed the door behind him. Ken followed shortly after and they went separate ways and met in an alley behind the store.

"Hehe! Did you see that? I thought I'd be shot by that guard!"

"I just can't understand how you managed to pull it off."

"Let's get over to the Laboratory now. It's almost noon"


The Laboratory was located in probably the worst part of town. The buildings hadn't seen a drop of paint in at least sixty years. The entrance looked like it hadn't been opened in five. Ken kicked some of the garbage and empty cannisters away from the door so that they could reach the terminal. He pressed one of the unmarked rusty buttons. Nothing happened. He pressed another one. Nothing. Roger suggested that Ken should try all of them, but at the same time a speaker in the wall cried out.

"Hey! Back off! Stop playing with the door bell! Are you trying to wake up the whole block?"

"We're looking for Frank Lyons"

"Oh, it's you.. Well, hang on.."

"Yeah? This is Frank. Who's this?"

"It's Roger and Ken. May we come in ?"

"Sure. I'll open the door"


An electric motor hummed for a few seconds and the door opened. Ken and Roger stepped in and the door closed behind them. Inside there was a narrow passage going straight on. On both sides there were doors with coat upon coat with prehistoric grafiti. They walked on and stopped in front of an elevator door. The elevator had just arrived and the doors pushed aside automatically. A small video camera was located in one of the corners inside the elevator. The doors closed and the elevator began to move. A short while later the doors opened again.

"Hi Frank!"

"Hey! So you are the guys we've been hearing so much about on the nets?"

"I guess so."


Frank got a bit nervous when he heard Ken and Roger had started working for the CERT, but calmed down when Roger suggested that in addition to the brand new portable, they would give them information directly from CERT in exchange for some more information on the WORM. Frank showed them the listing they had managed to get from the small parts of code the WORM had left in their mainframe supposed to destroy the systems. They had managed to detect and stop it before it did any damage so Frank concluded that the person who had made the WORM either didn't want to harm any hacker systems or simply wasn't the coder he was cracked up to be. According to Frank, no one had seen anything about the WORM on any system except for the general warnings and discussions on who had made it. Frank got more and more distracted playing with his new portable so Ken and Roger decided to go back to CERT.

When they returned they uploaded the listing to the CERT mainframe and put the code cracking systems to work. The listing triggered just about every virus and trojan detection systems in the mainframe. This certainly was a hot piece of code. It was packed with instructions specially designed to attack both biological and digital peripheral hardware. Ken even found a routine designed to burn the very popular ionization hardcopy printers that almost everyone had. It was quite clear that the code was simply a compilation of every available routine that did some damage to peripheral hardware. And probably the most frightening of all, this was just a piece of it.

The hardcopy plotters started spitting sheet after sheet of reports on the code. The CERT mainframe's code cracking systems suggested that the skeleton code was a piece of self-modifying code designed to run on virtually any system by testing which instructions were legal and which were not. None of the engineers at CERT had seen anything similar in their life. Roger walked towards one of the plotters and picked up a report.

"Hey! This looks just like the trojan we made for that softball team that wanted to cheat in the series, Ken"

"What?! Are you sure?"

"I'm positive. Look - there's even some of the original comments stored here! Why that stinking son of a sossage! Someone ripped our routines."

"You know what?"

"No Ken, tell me."

"I think this WORM has been living on the EISDN network for quite some time. It's about three years since we made that trojan, and as far as I remember we erased all traces of it after we had used it. I bet..."


Ken told everyone about what he though. Aparently the WORM was based on a self-modifying skeleton or kernel that snooped around in every mainframe it was sent through. Then it analyzed code on this mainframe looking for specific viral and trojan type of routines. Then it copied these routines into its own code. The fact was that almost every hacker used an illegal account on some mainframe to store their code, since disk space basically was too expensive. Ken suggested that they picked out the most badly written routines from the WORM and showed it around the hacker scene. The badly written routines was probably written by some hacker that didn't mind speaking to the CERT. They simply had nothing to fear. The best routines belonged to professional hackers that guarded their identity with their lives.