Definitive coverage of a December, 1988 DECNet worm, the "Father Christmas" or HI.COM worm. The worm itself has some interest: the author wrote it in DCL, the VAX/VMS scripting language, and the worm counts as one of the very few non-TCP/IP worms (Shoch and Hupp's Alto worms, and the other VMS worm "WANK/OILZ").
Father Christmas worm infected a DECNet network named "SPAN", run by NASA during the 80s. Information on the Father Christmas worm never got widely disseminated outside the VMS system admin circles, probably due to the hierarchical, need-to-know culture of those same VMS circles.
Take the report's numbers with a grain of salt: other authorities have a much smaller number of hosts connected to SPAN.
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