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every outbreak with breathless copy and splashy headlines.’ But justified or not, the alarm was spreading ever wider.

On the evening of 2 November 1988, a little over five weeks after the Time story appeared, events occurred that appeared to fulfil the doomsday prophecies of the security specialists and the trade press.

Between 5 and 6 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, on that Wednesday night, a rogue program was loaded on to the ARPANET system. Three hours later, across the continent at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, operators noticed that their computers were running down. Something was taking up computer space, slowing the machines to a crawl. At 10.54 p.m. managers at the University of California at Berkeley discovered what they thought was a hacker trying to break into their systems. As the attempts continued and as the attacks increased they realized to their horror it wasn’t a hacker. It was a program, and it was multiplying.

By that time the same program was attacking the computer at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as well as sites at Purdue, Princeton and Stanford. It was moving across networks, spreading from the ARPANET on to MILNET – the Department of Defense computer network – and then on to Internet, which itself links 400 local area networks. It spread to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then to the University of Maryland, then across the country again to the University of California campus at San Diego, and then into the NASA Ames Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Library in New Mexico. Within a few hours the entire Internet system was under siege. Peter Yee, at Ames, posted the first warning on the network’s electronic mail service at 2.28 a.m. ‘We are currently under attack from an Internet virus. It has hit UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford and NASA Ames . . .’

Yee had earlier spotted what seemed to be an entire army of intruders attempting to storm his computer. He counterattacked, killing off some of the invaders. But then came another wave, and another. He was being overwhelmed. His powerful computer had started to slow down noticeably, its energy drained by the proliferation