Blaster Writer Caught

Henry V .009 writes "The FBI will be arresting an 18 year-old in connection with MS Blaster, reports The Washington Post." According to the article, the teen was witnessed testing the worm, and then turned in by a bystander. It's also worth noting that this is merely one of the Blaster variations. Hope whoever it was had fun, because a world of pain is waiting in store now.

Comments

A witness turned him in?!?

[corebreech]

How on Earth do you witness somebody writing a virus?

He's sitting in front of a computer, hitting keys on the keyboard and looking at the monitor. That describes the person who wrote this story, the person who submitted this story, the person who posted the story, me getting first post, and everybody reading and moderating this and every other post to come.

It also describes RMS writing Emacs, Linus debugging the kernel, and SCO issuing another press release.

Did this witness actually read the code? What kind of idiot virus-writer lets someone he doesn't know pull up a chair and start auditing his code?

Or was the witness tipped off when the screen start flashing "NOW TESTING VIRUS"? Damn, I hate when that happens!

This doesn't sound quite right.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

[turgid]

What is with this whole 'virgin' preocupation? Why is anyone concerned with this kid's (or any kid's) level of sexual activity? I don't understand.

...beacause it's still a socially-acceptable way to stereotype and belittle young men. You would never hear of people using the term "18 year-old girl, probably still a virgin" in similar circumstances. It's hypocrasy, ignorance and spitefullness.

Im guessing it was a mate of his

[msim]

I mean, maybe he borrowed his mates computer to do something, saw something interesting, then got told to take a long walk off a short plank when he tried to blackmail him.

Well until someone is caught and Proven to have written the virus, as far as im concerned it is a bunch of FUD.

Re:Will be arresting...

[TheDredd]

Well if he's reads slashdot, he'll be long gone by now

Is it standard FBI practise to anounce to the public they will arrest someone before they actually do?

He did not write MS blaster

[watzinaneihm]

I submitted this story sometime ago, but got rejected. The kid actually did not write the MSBlaster worm, he modified it to make it more potent and released it. story here

Bragging

[PrImED73]

Perhaps, as some kids are at that age do (not all before you flame me), he had been bragging about it in an irc chat room, had an enemy/concerned chatter catch wind of it and reported it to the feds with logs and IP information.

Why not eh? stranger things have happened at sea.

Re:Seriously? Arrest Microsoft, Inc.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Exactly how do you put a fictitious legal entity in Jail? Or perhaps you meant the entire company and everyone who worked there.

I'm a firm believer that Microsoft, for all it's faults, isn't nearly as much of a problem as it's doting customers. Microsoft has ALWAYS been terrible at security. This is not news. So who the hell keeps buying their crap?

Start charging the folks who deploy Microsoft for negligence.

Yo, RTFP/RTFA

[RedBear]

Yo, RFTP/RTFA. It says in both the article and the post that the witness saw the person "testing" the virus, not writing it. Which is even more scary in a way. How did the witness know what he was doing? What day was it? Which version is he supposed to have written? Oh, and there has been "no arrest made in this matter yet."

The BBC article contains a bit more info: It says he's suspected of altering the original MSBlast worm into one that would cause more damage.

It also says: "Reports suggest he is likely to be arrested by the end of the day." WTF? They're giving him advance warning?!? Run, boy, RUN!!! LOL.

No wonder he got caught

[Xel'Naga]

IIRC, the boy tried to DDOS www.windowsupdate.com, which is not the URL people usually use for windowsupdate.
Makes you wonder what a professional terrorist could do. The worm could have been far more destructive.

Re:Seriously? Arrest Microsoft, Inc.

[beacher]

Ralph Nader brought the automotive industries up to safety standards. I'm too young to remember the public's preception of him, but it sounds like we need someone like him around again. Microsoft has enough defects inside it's operating system to make it the 2000's equivalent of the Ford Pinto. They should be held accountable.

What about the users though? This isn't the 70's and information is readily available about Microsoft's security practices. Why do they do it? Is it like riding a rollercoaster that has a 6 junction split at the end, only 2 of which leads to the egress queue, 3 of which leave you hanging on the top of a hill until you debug the rollercoaster, and the final split has a jump through a fiery ring with no landing zone? I mean come on, they all saw the rollercoaster... They all knew the ramifications of their actions.. What about them?

-B

One word:

[Motherfucking Shit]

Mafiaboy.

Given the age (he was only 15!), and given the media, he was still crucified. There was no sympathy angle, there was no "youngster gets hassled by overzealous feds" angle. He was, as could be expected, generally portrayed as an evil h4x0r who DoSed eTrade, eBay, Yahoo, etc.

No, whomever launched MSBlaster.B is not going to become a media darling, and he damned sure isn't going to win the hearts and minds of Joe Sixpack, whose computer kept rebooting itself due to the various incarnations of MSBlaster.

From a personal standpoint, I think it's sort of shitty that this kid is getting busted for what seems to amount to no more than a bit of hex editing. I'd rather see the FBI investing its resources into tracking down the author of the original MSBlaster (as opposed to a barely-modified variant which didn't propagate widely)... And I'd much rather see them go after whatever assclown is responsible for SoBig.F, of which I've now received more than 6,000 copies at 100KB apiece. That's not to say that they aren't investigating these things, and I hope they find the perps eventually; but I think it's a bad deal that they're going to bust a kid who made a knock-off instead of the guy who started it.

I really don't buy the sympathy angle. The guy allegedly launched a worm variant, he probably bragged about it (another similarity to Mafiaboy), according to MSNBC, the FBI subpoenaed IRC server logs to track him down. Launch a worm and gloat about it to your 31337 buddies, and you get what's coming.

Prison rape

[Boing]

Okay, this will likely be treated as a troll, but I have a little karma to burn. I have issue with the people who are moderating the numerous "haha this guy will get raped in jail" comments as "funny". Prison rape is a serious issue, as much as real-world rape. This kid is eighteen. He did something that pissed off a lot of the world (including most of the people reading slashdot). But, legally or not, he's a damn kid. If you're older than eighteen, how many asswitted things did you do when you were that age? Would you have ever thought that the idea of you getting raped for any of them was acceptable?

I expect the comments in the first place. It's inevitable among any community that has people the likes of the "Frist p0st" and "go to cnn.com [secret link to goatse.cx]" commenters. But the moderation system is in place so that crap like that can get ignored by the people who don't want to hear it.

If you think it's funny, Obviously I can't/won't stop you from moderating it that way. But think about the real issue behind it before you encourage lighthearted humor about rape.

Re:Huh huh, he said penis...

[Felinoid]

There is also a possability they busted someone who was just discecting blaster not making a new varent.

To a techno neophite there isn't much diffrence. If the guy decompiled the code and his friend looked over his sholder his friend would see someone with the blaster source.
Decompillers aren't so well known now a days so even an experenced programmer who might normally know what he is looking at might not recognise this as decompiler output and not original source code.

He might also not realise you generally can not recompile decompiled code.

Or the busted teen is an idiot who said "Hay watch this. I got blaster. Now I'm chaning it to penis32. Aren't I clever?"

Misprison of a felony

[SunPin]

Look it up, amigo. If you know about a felony and you don't report it, you are guilty of cover-up and can serve time for your avoidance of doing the right thing.

You have an amazingly rosy view of how the law works in this country. You must be those law-abiding citizens with nothing to fear that I keep hearing about. When we have laws that will revoke habeas corpus for the bizarre and impossible crime of loitering with space aliens (1982, Department of defense appropriations bill) and the hard-hitting "conspiracy of one", you can and will go down for anything if they want you.

Do you think it's an accident that we have the largest prison population, in absolute and relative terms, in the world?

Belittling ourselves

[phorm]

Actually, considering the self-deprecating humour on slashdot, I wouldn't read too much into it. How many of us have joked about "slashdot readers being virgins." Mainly because we have a large geeky population, and many (but not all) of said geeky population lack the social skills to properly interface with members of the same gender, let alone the opposite sex.

The virgin isn't really a reference to sexual activity per-se, so much as it is a reference to the fact that somebody with so much a lack of a "life" probably is very likely sitting in front of a PC 24/7 and not meeting women.

Actually, sounds a lot like me in High School. Except that I didn't write viruses (custom backdoors to deal with people in the lab I didn't like, yes, but the teachers knew and found it amusing), and I now do have a social/sex life in addition to geeky pursuits.

Of course... another trademark of my geekdom is that said social life usually falls on the backburner whenever the newest Final Fantasy or RPG comes out... luckily the g/f is into 'em too (though I haven't gotten her on Warcraft/Starcraft or FPS yet).

Bill Gates taunt in worm.

[RoadWarriorX]

Researchers also discovered another message hidden inside the infection that appeared to taunt Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates: "billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!"

Gee, maybe we should take his message more seriously. Maybe the author of the worm is correct in some aspects. Some say that Microsoft is solely to blame for this. I'd say it is not 100% correct. There is a shared blame for the security problems:

1. Microsoft, like many other companies, always preferred to have features and ease-of-use over security. To be fair, Microsoft and it's security initiatives have been somewhat successful, the preference still remains. The security problems still will continue.
2. The U.S. Government, specifically the Federal Trade Commission. They has continually ignored the fact that security problems in Microsoft software has costed the government, businesses and individuals billons of dollars combined over the years. We see that monetary quantification all of the time, however, the always forget the real impact of individuals. These security problems do affect the daily life of individuals, from deleted homework assignments to identity theft.
3. The Mass Market. This is because the mass-market of computer users want simplicity because they are not willing to take the time to learn about it's implications. They are technologically challenged. So, the mass-market users are mostly willing to sacrifice their security and privacy in order to have this simplicity. If they still continue to use products knowing that their time, their identity, their money and their life might be affected by the use of these products, then I do not feel sorry for them at all. They've made their consumer choices, let them learn from their mistakes.

--
No memory available for sig. Please reboot now.

Scapegoat?

[Attaturk]

Apart from the obvious "innocent until proven guilty" matter, how about we don't publicly hang some kid for tweaking a virus until we've found the real author and proved his/her guilt.