In the Detective Chatroom A Spike Adams Mystery "The network crashed," hollered Mike Hammer. The silly gumshoe had apparently been "booted," and only recently re-admitted into the chatroom. He typed frantically: "I don't know which one of you guys did it, so I think I'll shoot you all." "Wait," exclaimed Miss Marple. "We can't all be guilty." She paused and added, "Oh, but then again, it could be a conspiracy." "A conspiracy!" screamed Hammer, reaching for his pistol. The detectives all ducked behind the furniture. "Whoa, let's be civilized," said Philip Marlowe, raising a white handkerchief in his manicured fingers. Sam Spade didn't say anything. His face was wooden, and when he scowled, his eyetooth crawled nervously from behind his upper lip. The quiet evening held premonitions of gunfire and burnt cordite. You could cut the tension with a pick ax. Calming down, Hammer reholstered his weapon. "Who runs this chatroom, anyway?" came the fluty voice of Sherlock Holmes from beside the fireplace. "The Pinkertons?" muttered Spade. "Rich people?" mumbled Easy Rollins. "The Vatican?" chortled Father Brown. "Yes, the Vatican?" echoed the Rabbi from behind the coffee table. I typed: "I think it's a private operation." Miss Marple queried me, "How would you crash a network, Mr. Adams?" The sleuths all looked at me. "You would have to exploit a weakness in the middle layers of software or activate a program that would force all the servers along a network path to shut down. One easy way would be to cut an underground backbone. A farmer did that once, looking to bury a dead cow. . . . " Sam Spade interrupted: "You mean a network can crash accidentally and you can't tell if it was accidental or not? "Exactly." They all laughed. I continued, "Back in January 1990, AT&T crashed its own telephone system by installing faulty software into its switches. The new software patch, an enhancement to the existing program, caused a chain reaction that immobilized incoming calls for hours, until the software could be pulled." "They crashed their own system?" trilled Hercule Poirot. "Yes. That was unintentional." "Please answer my question," interjected Miss Marple. "Okay. Personally, I'd use a worm," I said. "Do you mean a worm or a bug?" asked the Rabbi. "A worm." "First you get bugs, then you get worms," commented Sam Spade, rolling a cigarette. "Do you mind not smoking, Mr. Spade?" shouted Miss Marple. "Awright. Adams, you just go on and tell us about the worm." He pointed a thick finger at me. "It's a lot of programming mumbo-jumbo," I replied. "Basically, a worm replicates and propagates -- copies itself and seeks out other computers. The worm infects a whole network by cycling instructions until computers start crashing. This is what happened in the fall of 1988. A doctoral student launched an Internet worm that crashed more than 6,000 computers. It took weeks to clean up the mess. The funny thing was that he could have done more damage by erasing files -- which he didn't." By the time I'd finished my explanation, the user list in the chatroom had whittled down to Spade and myself. "Do you mind if I smoke, now?" he typed. "Sure, go ahead." I watched the long curls of smoke drift over the lines of text. March 24, 1999