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hackers, he discovered the real names of Bach and Handel. He immediately posted an electronic message to all other users on SPAN, and named the two students involved.

Bach and Handel panicked. They assumed they would be prosecuted by the German authorities, and contacted Steffen at Chaos for advice.

Steffen was in Cologne when he took their call, visiting a colleague. As luck would have it, the ever-reliable Hans Gliss also lives in Cologne. Steffen rang him, and Gliss in turn contacted the Verfassungsschutz, the German secret service.⁷ The agency said it would be interested in talking to the two hackers.

Prior to meeting the agents, Bach and Handel prepared a report, dated 17 August 1987, detailing all the installations that had been penetrated by the VAXbusters. The list comprised 135 sites in total, all on SPAN. It included nineteen installations at NASA, among them two VAX sites at the headquarters in Washington, DC, six at the Goddard Space Flight Center and ten at the Marshall Space Flight Center. It also included a large number at CERN in Switzerland and others at the European Space Agency in The Netherlands, the Meudon Observatory and the Institut d'Astrophysique in Paris, and various Max Planck Institute sites in Germany.

There was a 'full and frank exchange of information' at the meeting. In return for Bach and Handel's co-operation, the authorities declined to prosecute. The secret service then contacted the CIA in Bonn, as well as NASA, Digital and other groups the agency felt should be put in the picture.

In the hope of defusing the situation for the VAXbusters, it was decided that their story should be released to the press on 15 September 1987. The delay, it was thought, would give all the affected sites enough time to repair their defences. Gliss would cover the technical aspects in the Datenschutz-Berater and two journalists who were known to Wernery would handle the media. The journalists told the full story graphically on TV in the evening; the next morning it was splashed in newspapers around the country.

A few days later the two journalists had a second chance at the story when it was realized that NASA had still not removed the VAXbuster's programs (the 'trap' programs) from its two computers

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