Am I going nuts, or did Mary Anne post something about this? The thread appeared, and then disappeared. The kid is facing up to five years' imprisonment, plus compensation payments that will run into the millions.
Police: Sasser suspect confesses
Saturday, May 8, 2004 Posted: 11:18 AM EDT (1518 GMT)
The suspect was held in the northern town of Waffensen.
BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- German authorities have arrested an 18-year-old suspected of creating the "Sasser" computer worm, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, an official said Saturday.
The suspect, a high school student, was arrested Friday and has told authorities he was behind the worm, said Frank Federau, a spokesman for the state criminal office in Hanover.
Police and prosecutors on Friday searched his parents' house in the northern town of Waffensen, Federau said. He did not release the man's identity, and said he did not immediately have details of how the suspect was tracked down.
The teenager is being investigated on suspicion of computer sabotage, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, said Detlef Ehrike, another state criminal office spokesman. After being questioned, he was released pending charges.
The German newsweekly Der Spiegel reported, without citing sources, that the CIA and FBI also were involved in the hunt for the worm's creator, whom it identified as Sven J. It said the suspect's motives were unclear.
The worm raced around the world over the past week, exploiting a flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.
The German government's information technology security agency said there were four versions of Sasser. Spokesman Michael Dickopf said he didn't know whether the arrested teenager was responsible for all of them.
"The first version was amateurish," Dickopf said. However, the others "were clearly different in the damage they caused."
Unlike most outbreaks, Sasser does not require users to activate it by clicking on an e-mail attachment. Once inside, the worm scans the Internet for others to attack, causing some computers to continually crash and reboot.
Sasser is known as a network worm because it can automatically scan the Internet for computers with the security flaw and send a copy of itself there.
On Monday, the worm hit public hospitals in Hong Kong and one-third of Taiwan's post office branches. Twenty British Airways flights were each delayed about 10 minutes Tuesday due to Sasser troubles at check-in desks, while British coast guard stations used pen and paper for charts normally generated by computer.
Home users were particularly hit hard, computer security experts say, because they generally lack the know-how to install patches and tend not to have the firewalls needed to keep Sasser from spreading to other computers via the Internet.
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.
Police: Sasser suspect confesses
Saturday, May 8, 2004 Posted: 11:18 AM EDT (1518 GMT)
The suspect was held in the northern town of Waffensen.
BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- German authorities have arrested an 18-year-old suspected of creating the "Sasser" computer worm, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, an official said Saturday.
The suspect, a high school student, was arrested Friday and has told authorities he was behind the worm, said Frank Federau, a spokesman for the state criminal office in Hanover.
Police and prosecutors on Friday searched his parents' house in the northern town of Waffensen, Federau said. He did not release the man's identity, and said he did not immediately have details of how the suspect was tracked down.
The teenager is being investigated on suspicion of computer sabotage, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, said Detlef Ehrike, another state criminal office spokesman. After being questioned, he was released pending charges.
The German newsweekly Der Spiegel reported, without citing sources, that the CIA and FBI also were involved in the hunt for the worm's creator, whom it identified as Sven J. It said the suspect's motives were unclear.
The worm raced around the world over the past week, exploiting a flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.
The German government's information technology security agency said there were four versions of Sasser. Spokesman Michael Dickopf said he didn't know whether the arrested teenager was responsible for all of them.
"The first version was amateurish," Dickopf said. However, the others "were clearly different in the damage they caused."
Unlike most outbreaks, Sasser does not require users to activate it by clicking on an e-mail attachment. Once inside, the worm scans the Internet for others to attack, causing some computers to continually crash and reboot.
Sasser is known as a network worm because it can automatically scan the Internet for computers with the security flaw and send a copy of itself there.
On Monday, the worm hit public hospitals in Hong Kong and one-third of Taiwan's post office branches. Twenty British Airways flights were each delayed about 10 minutes Tuesday due to Sasser troubles at check-in desks, while British coast guard stations used pen and paper for charts normally generated by computer.
Home users were particularly hit hard, computer security experts say, because they generally lack the know-how to install patches and tend not to have the firewalls needed to keep Sasser from spreading to other computers via the Internet.
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.
I know one company where everyone had to "upgrade" to WinME
