Purdue Agrees to Withhold Details of ‘Virus’ Program

Purdue University has complied with a government agency’s request to hide its information about the virus program that jammed thousands of computers across the country last week, a researcher said Friday.

However, such action is not likely to prevent a determined computer hacker from wreaking havoc again, Eugene H. Spafford, an assistant professor and computer scientist at Purdue, said by phone from the campus in West Lafayette.

“The worry of the National Computer Security Center, and our worry, is that if somebody gets even a significant portion of the source code, then they could turn out something more dangerous,” Spafford said.

Since hundreds of copies of the errant program already are out, Spafford believes that trying to control the information “is a losing battle.”

Spreads Like a Virus

Last Thursday, the “worm” program rapidly duplicated itself in computer systems nationwide, spreading like a virus, slowing the computers’ processing speeds and filling up their memories.

At Purdue, the program entered a computer connected to INTERNET, an international computer network on which researchers from universities, computer companies and some government installations share information and resources.

Officials from the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency, contacted Purdue this week and asked that data on the program be removed from a file where others could have access to it.

The Purdue file had “copies of the worm program and somewhat disassembled, somewhat reverse-compiled versions of the code,” Spafford said. “This could be used to understand how it worked, but it wasn’t in a form that could be used to construct a new version.”

He said the university did not consider the data potentially harmful but removed it “in an attempt to be cooperative.”

However, people who run the thousands of computers affected by the virus believe they “need to see the code so they can feel comfortable that no damage was actually done . . . so they can be sure they plugged all the holes that could be exploited. That’s also a valid viewpoint,” Spafford said.