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Zotob and Mytob Worm Authors Arrested
An anonymous reader writes "The Washingtonpost.com is reporting that two men have been arrested for allegedly authoring and releasing the "Zotob" and "Mytob" worms. The first Zotob, released Aug 14 - just 4 days after Microsoft released a fix for the hole it exploited, infected systems at many major news outlets. Mytob remains one of the most pervasive worms on the 'Net today." From the article: "Moroccan authorities, working with the FBI, arrested Farid Essebar, 18, a Moroccan national born in Russia who went by the screen moniker 'Diabl0.' Arrested in Turkey was Atilla Ekici, aka 'Coder,' age 21. Both individuals will be subject to local prosecutions, the FBI said." Update: 08/26 20:56 GMT by Z : Nana Mous wrote to mention an eWeek blow by blow account of Microsoft's response to the worm. Very interesting read.
Atilla, you don't need a cool alias - you already have one!
2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2
You know how it is. When you're young, it's hard to keep your worm to yourself.
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they had apparently commented the code: //.. @uthors: Farid Essebar, Atilla Ekici
in morroco if they ctch you hcking they will cut your pinkies off, it mkes cpitliztion rel bitch. trust me i know
How on earth do they find these people?
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
The worm also is thought to have temporarily disabled the systems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security uses to screen airline passengers entering the United States.
Oh so the airport screening machines are on the internet, are they? I feel safer in the hands of people as competent as the DHS already...
Or more likely, this is just another piece of DHS propaganda designed to enphasize how dangerous those virus writers are. So dangerous they can disable our precious airport security systems! Terrorists!!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I'm still waiting for the virus that infects systems through vulnerabilities in IE or Outlook/OE, then:
- Installs Firefox
- Configures it to be the default browser
- Imports the IE favorites to the bookmarks,
- Edits the registry to disable IE as much as possible
- Installs Thunderbird
- Configures it to be the default email client
- Imports contents of Outlook and OE address book to Thunderbird
- Uninstalls Outlook Express and OE
- Deletes itself
The writer of this 'virus' should get a frickin' medal.____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Pointing at the emperor and throwing rocks at his balls are two very different things. They could of just pointed. They went the rocks at balls path.
Happy Birthday, Joshi.
I'm waiting for the worm that installs itself, grabs a baseball and begins beating the user over the head shouting in a William Shatner voice "Look... you fucking idiot... don't open... mail with attachments..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well moroccan prisons are certainly not five stars hotels, but I am pretty sure that it's much much more confortable for this guy to have it's trial in his home country rather than in the US nowdays with all the terrorist paranoia going in this country.
I am a Moroccan national, and I have partically renounced travelling to the US after all the horrors stories people I know have told me they have faced in US airports.
Morocco is not really a democratic country (yet), but things are slowly evolving in the good way and nothing similar to Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo has happened lately in Morocco, since Tazmamart which was really horrible for those who have heard about it.
I'm assuming you didn't read any of the articles above.
The exploit was for a patch MICROSOFT HAD ALREADY RELEASED. They were merely taking advantage of the hole that Microsoft revealed by making the patch available.
I fail to see how these guys deserve anything but the punishment they are getting.