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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'."
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/v iew/83848/1/.html
The motives of the alleged Sasser author were still unclear, but Der Spiegel suggested the teen may have wanted to drum up business for his mother, who owns a company offering assistance to computer owners.
granted, im no microsoft lover, but im also kind of against punks like this guy... he has probably cost me almost $500 since this worm started in my PERSONAL services to my friends and family in order to get this all cleared up..
as for ms, they should be considered just as guilty, with such a large corporate juggernaught they have, they should be able to look for these vulnerabalities early, and maybe go through some more extensive testing.. or at the VERY LEAST spend a million or so and tell they public they messed up, and how to fix it... (run windows update) at least this way, you have a educated public... ignornance is NOT strength.
Excellent, hopefully they can ask hima simple question and we can put another argument to rest - Was he aware of the exploit from his own hacking, or being told about it by someone, or did he just read the exploit advisory from Microsoft when they released the patch?
Realistically odds have to favour just reading the advisory, but there have been plenty of claims to the contrary.
The next question is, will any media actually bother to find out and publish the answer to that question. I'm guessing "absolutely no chance in hell".
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Two possibilities as I see them. First the kid was stupid enough to write and release the worm from his own machine leaving behind traces or was not careful enough hiding his tracks. Second, the kids' machine was hacked and used to hide the real creator of the worm while releasing the worm. I haven't RTA but I think these two conclusions are logical.
Does it go on forever?
not really an important one, but still.
Sasser broke a new record in the time it took to find the worm, from the time the hole on which the worm was based was issued a public patch. Now that we, allegedly, have the worm's author, we can ask him whether it was rev-enged from the patch, or whether he had prior knowledge of the hole.
Shachar
P.S.
I would wager the former, but still interesting to get an authorative answer.
Hardly likely to have happened, since according to the Yahoo! Germany newswire, Microsoft gave the vital hint to the German police that led to the arrest. Which makes you wonder whether they scanned their Apache..erm..IIS server logfiles to see who was reading about certain security alerts.
"Microsoft signs security pact with Germany" http://news.com.com/2100-7343-5204643.html
That was on may 4th... Today THEY GOT HIM. Thats quite a remarkable effort from the Private Secret Police of Microsoft.
Robert