McMahon wondered if the author had done this on purpose, to make it harder to figure out exactly what the worm was capable of doing. Perhaps, he thought, the code had once been nice and linear and it all made sense. Then the author chopped it to pieces, moved the middle to the top, the top to the bottom, scrambled up the chunks and strung them all together with a bunch of `GO TO' commands. Maybe the hacker who wrote the worm was in fact a very elegant DCL programmer who wanted the worm to be chaotic in order to protect it. Security through obscurity.
Oberman maintained a different view. He believed the programming style varied so much in different parts that it had to be the product of a number of people. He knew that when computer programmers write code they don't make lots of odd little changes in style for no particular reason.
Kevin Oberman and John McMahon bounced ideas off one another. Both had developed their own analyses. Oberman also brought Mark Kaletka, who managed internal networking at Fermilab, one of HEPNET's largest sites, into the cross-checking process. The worm had a number of serious vulnerabilities, but the problem was finding one, and quickly, which could be used to wipe it out with minimum impact on the besieged computers.
Whenever a VMS machine starts up an activity, the computer gives it a unique process name. When the worm burrowed into a computer site, one of the first things it did was check that another copy of itself was not already running on that computer. It did this by checking for its own process names. The worm's processes were all called NETW_ followed by a random, four-digit number. If the incoming worm found this process name, it assumed another copy of itself was already running on the computer, so it destroyed itself.
The answer seemed to be a decoy duck. Write a program which pretended to be the worm and install it across all of NASA's vulnerable computers. The first anti-WANK program did just that. It quietly sat on the SPAN computers all day long, posing as a NETW_ process, faking out any real version of the WANK worm which should come along.
Oberman completed an anti-WANK program first and ran it by McMahon. It worked well, but McMahon noticed one large flaw. Oberman's program checked for the NETW_ process name, but it assumed that the worm was running under the SYSTEM group. In most cases, this was true, but it didn't have to be. If the worm was running in another group, Oberman's program would be useless. When McMahon pointed out the flaw, Oberman thought, God, how did I miss that?
McMahon worked up his own version of an anti-WANK program, based on Oberman's program, in preparation for releasing it to NASA.
At the same time, Oberman revised his anti-WANK program for DOE. By Monday night US Eastern Standard Time, Oberman was able to send out an early copy of a vaccine designed to protect computers which hadn't been infected yet, along with an electronic warning about the worm. His first electronic warning, distributed by CIAC, said in part: