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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.
You'd think people smart enough to do something like this would be smart enough to shut their mouths. :)
Lucky, 143 plantiffs seeking only 158,000 in damages. Over here that kid would have been sued for 158,000,000!
Now if only we could figure out a bounty system to kill off those spyware and adware guys....
I thought there were more Windows machines than that.
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?
1. Write some evil worms
2. Get a friend to "inform" Microsoft
3. Pay $158,000 in damages.
4. Receive $250,000 from Microsoft.
5. Big party!?
Yes, I know - he'll probably have some other problems right now...
I'm glad damages here in Germany are a bit more realistic than in the US.
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The damages are so low because you have to prove in court that you actually lost the amount of money which you claim as damages. Over here, we don't have punitive damages.
It's good that they got this guy.
Now if someone will just offer a reward for catching whoever it was that lanched the years-long-now denial-of-service attack on Java applets.
The attackers posted something about "killing cross-platform Java by growing the polluted Java market." Apparently, their goal was to make it impossible to create trustworthy Java applets, by making it impossible for a website developer to predict whether the JVM client was compatible or not.
This DOS attack has been very successful in making people afraid to use Java applets. It has been one of the most costly DOS attacks in the history of the Internet. I really hope they can identify and charge the attackers.
In most of the (western) world, the damages awarded by courts are pretty down-to-earth.
It's the USA with its runaway legal system which is the sad exception to the rule.
As an american living in europe.. it's nice to see a court system work the way it's supposed to: As a last resort when you can't sort things out between yourselves, and where the damages you receive can only be expected to recover your losses, not make you a profit.
They're too busy hiring all the other brilliant software engineers who managed to find time in their days to *both* learn how to become brilliant software engineers, *and* develop even a minimal ethical framework for how to apply their skills.
Seems like an overwhelming task, but that's why they deserve a good job goddammit.
Jeesh.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
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.
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I saw this story on the front page and thought, "I wonder how many comments before someone makes a reference to prison rape." It was 14, and modded +4 Funny. Forgive the generalization, but what is the deal with Americans and prison rape? Every single time prison is mentioned (and most of the time criminals are mentioned), someone pipes up about men raping other men. I can understand the occasional reference, but this is obsessive. It's creepy.