'Slammer' Virus Didn't Cause Outage

Sept. 8 -- Officials at FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility under fire for its possible role in last month's blackout, said last week that a computer virus like the one that earlier infected computers at its Besse-Davis nuclear power plant wasn't to blame for the outage. Responding to a question from Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey during testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chief executive Peter Burg said FirstEnergy's grid computers don't use Microsoft software and so are immune to the Slammer worm. Markey, who wasn't satisfied, said, "FirstEnergy should not have a license to drive a car, let alone operate nuclear power plants."