Sasser Author Under Arrest, Say German Police

Apogee writes "A number of german news websites, like n-tv, or the german yahoo news site (courtesy of the german press agency, lending this some credibility) (web sites in german) report that the programmer of the Sasser worm has been arrested by German police. The Sasser author is an 18-year-old man who was arrested on Friday in Rotenburg, Germany. With the Sasser worm being the latest among worms that spread like wildfire among unpatched windows boxes, and apparently also caused serious computer outages and cost to the economy, how will this be transformed into an indictment?" Update: 05/08 18:41 GMT by T : SexySas writes "As the German news site heise reports, the 18-year-old author of Sasser is responsible for Netsky, too. The German police is talking about 'a milestone in war against cybercrime'."

Comments

Not framed?

[Luguber123]

How can one make sure he was not framed?

Also what international terrorist law is he going to be tortured for?

Liability

[madaxe42]

How, exactly, is he any more liable than the millions who run insecure, unpatched machines? It is the end user's responsibility to keep their machines secure. If you leave the doors to your house open, and a large neon sign over the threshold saying 'WELCOME', you'll be *damned* lucky if your insurer would pay up. If he hadn't exploited it, someone else would have, and the result would have been the same.
The reponsibility lies with microsoft, for creating shite software, with inherent vulnerabilities, and with the users, for not bothering to have any kind of protection.

Re:Liability

[cyxs]

well its kindof funny. If a lock maker made a lock that was easy to bypass and sold them, if the criminals started to look for that lock and use the bypass method to break into the house, i think that we would have a class action lawsuit on our hands against the lock maker, sure you should have had more then one lock but its still partly the lock markers fault.

Re:MS

[mfh]

> Bottom line is that irresponsible writing of worms and viruses is a crime of indiscrimination and chaos, and deserves to be punished as such.

And writing intentionally crappy operating systems isn't? Ask yourself: what would happen if they wrote something that was *perfect*?

NOT under arrest

[mi]

They have arrested him, but, evidently, later released. Says in this article:

All the teenager's computers were confiscated by police but the suspect himself was not in custody, [Spokesman for Lower Saxony police Frank] Federau said.

So, even the Slashdot editors don't RTFA anymore?

Re:Microsoft involvement [Re:they caught him...]

[JPriest]

I am SURE reading their IIS logs is exactly how they caught the guy. We all know MS releases better information on their vulnerabilities than the security firms that report them. Put your tinfoil hat back on and unplug your computer for me, thanks.

Troll Food

[the_mad_poster]

What? The copy you donated after you determined the "Dummies" version of TCP/IP was too far above your skill level for you to use?