The Mystery of the WANK Worm
In 1989, Galileo, a nuclear-powered spacecraft created by NASA, was set to launch. Its existence was controversial having been announced in the wake of the Challenger Disaster, but that wasn’t the people’s biggest concern. They were far more worried about the word nuclear. Of course, the cold war was still going on and the constant fear of nuclear war was on everyone's mind. So, it wasn’t too surprising when an unknown group decided to try and intervein.
What was the Wank Worm?
The Wank worm struck in October of 1989 at the Goddard Space Center. Wank stood for Worms Against Nuclear Killers and attacked computers with an initially very alarming message.
Right as you log into your computer for the workday, you were hit with this. An immediate sense of shock would rise as the worm started listing files it was deleting. One after another until all of your work was gone. Most people reacted out of shear panic, immediately clearing their entire system so the worm couldn’t spread. The unfortunate thing was that the ‘deleted files’ weren’t actually being deleted at all. The screen was just a ruse for the user since the worm didn’t have the ability to damage anything. All of the ‘damage’ caused by the worm was really caused by the user’s trying to preserve their systems. Thankfully, within a few hours an anti-WANK worm was created, and the systems were safe again. However, there was no way to get back any of the lost work.
How did it work?
As previously mentioned, the worm didn’t have the ability to inflict any damage, but how could it even get in in the first place? Well, worms work by spreading across networks and duplicating themselves. Once a worm duplicates it can spread to an uninfected system. The WANK worm was created to spread on the DECNET internet which was used by NASA’S SPAN network. DECNET made it possible for computers to communicate with one another across NASA’s network. However, this also meant that the worm would be able to reach any of those connected computers.
The worm started off in NASA’s Department of Energy but quickly spread to its true target by guessing passwords at a rapid speed. It basically was able to get in because of weak passwords. All it had to do was run through a simple strategy of guessing the most common passwords.
WANK’s Origin
As this is part of October’s unsolved series, it goes without saying that we don’t know where this worm came from. At first, it was believed to have originated in France. We now know that it probably came from Melbourne-based hackers. Law enforcement has pointed to a few notable hackers, but none have ever been confirmed. At some point, it seemed that Julian Assange, who went on to create WikiLeaks, may have been involved, but this was never confirmed either. No one has ever come forward and claimed the worm as their work, so it still goes unsolved even today. It is worth noting that the worm did not hit any of NASA’s computers in New Zealand which led to even more suspicion about its origin.
The WANK worm was one of the first instances of hacktivism. It did seem to veer on the side of caution, as its makers specifically prevented it from actually destroying anything. After Wank was taken down, a more sophisticated version called OILZ caused similar issues in the following days without directly deleting anything. Even still, the worms inadvertently caused a lot of chaos and ultimately resulted in a lot of wasted time but not the actual prevention of Galileo's launch.
