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German Teen Charged with Creating Sasser
nomoreself writes "Sven Jaschan, only 18 years old, has been indicted by prosecutors in Verden, Germany for allegedly releasing the well known Sasser worm. The PC World article has the details, including the fact that Microsoft's $250,000 reward offer was responsible for informants' coming forth with Jaschan's name, and that Jaschan has actually already confessed to writing several versions of Netsky, as well as the worm in question. Surprisingly enough, the 143 victims that have filed charges are only claiming $158,000 worth of damages." You might remember when he was first arrested back in May.
Worms are a two-sided problem. In order for them to happen, it takes a software writer (far too often that software writer being named "Microsoft"...) to create software that has a ready-to-exploit flaw in it, and then it just takes one evil-minded programmer to kick a worm through that hole and make a mess that makes all of us wearing white hats have to do some serious cleanup and deal with downtimes.
While I'm glad the kid is going to get taken to justice, I'm still a little troubled by the fact that all Microsoft doing for their part of it is releasing a "you shoulda run Windows Update" patch and kicking in a quarter-million US dollar reward... both of which they're doing out of the kindness of Bill Gates' heart because there's no law requiring either of them.
I know small time programmers need liability protection from the abuse of their software... but shouldn't a large company like Microsoft be liable for the cleanup costs associated with their own security bugs?
Not necessarily, it depends on why the person does something like this. In most cases the psychological reasons for creating a worm/virus, also would make the person want to brag about their accomplishment.
Maybe they do it because they want to show off their skills and boost their ego. In most cases people aren't happy knowing they are the greatest in the world, they want everybody else to affirm that feeling so they brag about their accomplishment to get recognition. Maybe they do it to get revenge, and they want those suffering to know who is causing the pain.
I think more than likely the person would end up talking. Just a few drinks at the bar and they might open up about their great accomplishment to uninterested patrons.
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a little math
5 years * 365 days in a year * 24 hours a day = 43800 hours in prison
$158,000 / 43800 hours = $3.60 an hour
or
5 years * 365 days in a year * work 8 hours a day = 14600 hours of work
$158,000 / 14600 hours = $10 an hour (if he works 8 hours a day)
When I was 13-16 I had the ability to create viruses with the capabilities as any major virus. And I am sure many slashdotters also had/have these ability.
I actually thought about releasing some viruses, well trojans, would not of done anything on the massive scale as some of this virus, I was not that stupid. Hell, I could actually be in jail now and life screwed up over something like that.
Exploiting windows machines has never be challenging has not been for the past decade. The fact that some kid could wreck their life over a couple lines of VB code is kind of sad. I think it was genius on microsoft's part to get people to want hunt and track down those evil virus kiddies.
It would be easier to create a destructive virus then it would be to rob a couple bags of chips from a store for most kids that create viruses. One might get you a slap on the rist (I am not sure how much you get in trouple for stealing couple dollars worth of food), and the other could get landing in jail and millions of dollars worth of damages.
I honestly do not think for most of these kids the punshiments should be that extreme especially since most of those kids probably only copied and pasted some code, or changed a few lines of code. The punishment should fit the crime, if you can cause millions of dollars worth of damages in under and hours worth of work, then something is not right. I do not see any other way of doing something that bad on a massive scale other then blowing up a building or running around with a gun.
I just hope these kids still get a chance to have a life, and they are only held partially responsible. If someone built a bridge that could be destroyed by walking over and pulling out a nail, and the hole thing would come down. There would be two people to blame. The designer and the person that actually did it. Lets just hope its handled carefully in this case.