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Sasser Author Under Arrest, Say German Police

Posted by Hemos on from the mein-wormen dept.

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'."

3 of 549 comments (clear)

  1. He was just helping his mother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. So, how did he find the exploit? by Coryoth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Microsoft involvement [Re:they caught him...] by j.leidner · · Score: 5, Interesting
    they shoulda waited until MS announced a reward for it first!

    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.