W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Keith Petersen) (07/06/88)
FBI TO INVESTIGATE ROGUE COMPUTER PROGRAM AT NASA NEW YORK (JULY 4) UPI - NASA officials have called on the FBI to investigate a rogue computer program that has destroyed information stored on its personal computers and those of several other government agencies, The New York Times reported today. The program was designed to sabotage computer programs at Electronic Data Systems of Dallas, the Times said. It did little damage to the Texas company, but wreaked havoc on thousands of personal computers nationwide, company spokesman Bill Wright told the newspaper. Although damage to government data was limited, NASA officials have asked the FBI to enter the case since files were destroyed, projects delayed and hundreds of hours spent tracking the electronic culprit at NASA and at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the United States Sentencing Commission. It was not known how the program, which damaged files during a five-month period beginning in January, spread from the Texas company to networks of personal computers and whether it was deliberately introduced at government agencies or brought in accidentally, the Times said. The computer program is one of at least 40, termed ''viruses,'' now identified in the United States, computer experts said. Viruses are designed to conceal their presence on a disk and to replicate themselves repeatedly onto other disks and into the memory banks of computers. The program currently being investigated is called the scores virus, the newspaper said. Some government officials say viruses are spread through informal networks of government computer users who exchange publicly available software. Viruses often lie dormant and then explode on a certain day or on contact with a specific computer program. They can erase entire disks, such as happened with a one word virus that flashed the word ''Gotcha!'' =END=