At about 4 p.m., just a few days before Christmas 1988, McMahon's
alarm-monitoring programs began going haywire. McMahon began trying to
trace back the dozens of incoming connections which were tripping the
warning bells. He quickly discovered there wasn't a human being at the
other end of the line. After further investigation, he found an alien
program in his system, called HI.COM. As he read the pages of HI.COM
code spilling from his line printer, his eyes went wide. He thought,
This is a worm! He had never seen a worm before.
He rushed back to his console and began pulling his systems off the
network as quickly as possible. Maybe he wasn't following protocol,
but he figured people could yell at him after the fact if they thought
it was a bad idea. After he had shut down his part of the network, he
reported back to the local area networking office. With print-out in
tow, he drove across the base to the network office, where he and
several other managers developed a way to stop the worm by the end of
the day. Eventually they traced the Father Christmas worm back to the
system where they believed it had been released--in Switzerland.
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