Love bloomed amid bureacracy BY William Matthews 05/11/2000

The "love bug" computer virus swept through the United States fast, and federal authorities moved slowly.

"In a lot of ways, getting a snippet from CNN was more valuable than what you could get through official channels," said Keith Rhodes, director of GAOs Office of Computer and Information Technology Assessment, speaking to a congressional committee Wednesday.

Official warnings were slowed by the need to have them reviewed and approved before they were released, Rhodes told the House Science Committees Technology Subcommittee.

The first official alert about the e-mail-borne computer virus came at 11 a.m. May 4 when the FBIs National Infrastructure Protection Center issued "a brief notice," according to the General Accounting Office. By then, thousands of government computers, from Congress to the Pentagon to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had already been infected, and some e-mail systems had been shut down. Love bug damage was long-since done by the time a second warning was issued at 9:30 p.m. from CERT, the federally funded computer emergency response team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The FBI issued a more detailed warning at 10 p.m.

At least four other government organizations  three of them in the Defense Department  are responsible for protecting federal computer systems, but none was able to sound an alarm fast enough to head off the love bug attack.

Bureaucracy was ill-equipped to deal with the swift-moving virus. The love bug spread worldwide in one days time, infecting an estimated 47 million computers. It was named for its e-mail subject line: "ILOVEYOU."

The virus was designed to spread fast. It copied itself into messages and mailed itself to all of the addresses in an infected computers e-mail address book. It also spread rapidly because it was released during a work week and without advance warning.

In addition to replicating and mailing itself, the virus deleted picture and sound files on hard drives. Damage cost estimates range upward from $6 billion.

The governments inability to cope with the love bug spotlights the need for a federal information technology "czar," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America.

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0508/web-love-05-11-00.asp

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 11, 2000