The protesters contended that if this shuttle blew up as Challenger did three years earlier in 1986, the plutonium spilled would cause widespread death to residents of Florida.
A comment inside the worm source code at the point of this branch logic indicated that New Zealand was a nuclear-free zone.
New Zealand had recently forbidden U.S. nuclear-powered vessels from docking at its harbours, thus further fueling the speculation inside NASA that the worm attack was related to the anti-nuclear protest.
[2] The line "You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war" is drawn from the lyrics of the Midnight Oil song "Blossom and Blood".
In addition, the worm contained "over sixty" randomizable messages that it would display to users, including "Vote anarchist" and "The FBI is watching YOU".
[1][2] R. Kevin Oberman (from DOE) and John McMahon (from NASA) wrote separate versions of an anti-WANK procedure and deployed them into their respective networks.
It exploited the fact that before infecting a system, WANK would check for NETW_(random number), that is a copy of its own, in the process table.
The program WANK_SHOT was designed by Bernard Perrow of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics to rename RIGHTLIST and replace it with a dummy database.