It was as if the creator of the worm started to pursue an idea and
then got sidetracked or interrupted. Suddenly he just stopped writing
code to implement that idea and started down another path, never again
to reach the end. The thing had a schizophrenic structure. It was all
over the place.
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.
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