Remember the botched anthrax investigation

by Michael Barone

 | May 22, 2017 03:24 PM

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In this Oct. 30, 2001, file photo, members of the U.S. Marine Corps' Chemical-Biological Incident Response Force demonstrate anthrax clean-up techniques during a news conference in on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Kenneth Lambert, File)

Kenneth Lambert

Amid the bipartisan acclaim for former FBI Director Robert Mueller on his appointment as special prosecutor, there has been almost no note of caution. But one comes from Carl Cannon, executive editor of RealClearPolitics, who has established himself as a straight shooter in more than 20 years of covering politics and government.

Writing in the Orange County Register, Cannon reviews the dismal performance of Mueller and James Comey on the 2001 anthrax letter attacks. In the process, Cannon also reviews the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's part in encouraging Mueller's and Comey's focus on an innocent scientist with no experience dealing with anthrax. Cannon credits his former Los Angeles Times colleague David Willman's  The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks and America's Rush to War, as the definitive account of the anthrax case.

Cannon is careful to concede the virtues of Mueller, Comey and Kristof. But his column is a reminder that even good people, without apparent political motive, can get important things very wrong. It's something worth keeping in mind as the Mueller investigation plays out.

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Authors Note: 

Another virus to hit the Internet in 2001 was the Nimda (which is admin spelled backwards) worm. Nimda spread through the Internet rapidly, becoming the fastest propagating computer virus at that time. In fact, according to TruSecure CTO Peter Tippett, it only took 22 minutes from the moment Nimda hit the Internet to reach the top of the list of reported attacks [source: Anthes].

The Nimda worm's primary targets were Internet servers. While it could infect a home PC, its real purpose was to bring Internet traffic to a crawl. It could travel through the Internet using multiple methods, including e-mail. This helped spread the virus across multiple servers in record time.

The Nimda worm created a backdoor into the victim's operating system. It allowed the person behind the attack to access the same level of functions as whatever account was logged into the machine currently. In other words, if a user with limited privileges activated the worm on a computer, the attacker would also have limited access to the computer's functions. On the other hand, if the victim was the administrator for the machine, the attacker would have full control.

The spread of the Nimda virus caused some network systems to crash as more of the system's resources became fodder for the worm. In effect, the Nimda worm became a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

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