Four Kids Confess to Goner Worm

imrdkl writes: "4 kids in Israel have confessed to writing and distributing the Goner worm, according to Fox." Yet another annoying worm comes and goes, wasting countless IT hours, to say nothing of bandwidth. The kids face up to five years -- of course since they aren't in the U.S., they might actually be punished.

Comments

They've already suffered enough

[cperciva]

I, for one, think that they've already suffered enough.

After all, judging by the virus code, it is almost certain that they had to use Microsoft software to create it.

Re:Well blahs all around

[Jucius Maximus]

"If our users had listened to the rules, this wouldn't have been a problem. But within 30 seconds of the attachment entering our network, over 50 users had run it. Why can't someone hold the irresponsible user at fault? The instructions are easy - don't run attachments you weren't expecting. Instead of blaming some kids for playing around with code, why can't we find fault in the people that don't follow their instructions?"

Thank you for saying this. It's not the virus makers that bring down networks, it's the people who fall for the same social engineering over and over again and click on the attachment.

I am scaring myself now because I am agreeing with the NRA - I've brought the 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' debate into this as an analogy. I apologise in advance for starting a flame war.

Re:Same old...

[Glytch]

Excellent point! After all, cracking down on drugs with harsh laws has made the drug trade stop.

Re:Don't worry too much.

[gnovos]

They're first time offenders who confessed. They're high school students who would otherwise be preparing to be drafted to the Israeli army soon, and the government will not want to disrupt that if it isn't necessary. Finally, they are from a town that is notorious for inducing boredom for its teenagers.

No, no, no! They are T E R R O R I S T S! Come on people, if you let terrorists like these kids off the hook, it's only a matter of time before they start bombing things and mailing anthrax, right? Gotta be tough.