On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 08:59:13AM -0700, JC Dill wrote:
(08-28) 20:31 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
The FBI has identified a teenager as the author of a damaging virus-like infection unleashed on the Internet and plans to arrest him early Friday, a U.S. official confirmed Thursday.
The 18-year-old, whose name and hometown was not immediately available, was accused of writing one version of the damaging "Blaster" infection, which spread quickly across the Internet weeks ago, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
All the national news services got this story wrong Friday. Here in MN local news had the facts straight. this guy is not the original author. As it turns out, this guy is a small-time script-kiddie. He "wrote" an uninteresting variant of the worm which directed people to his own web site (!). I'm hearing "facts" like "[Parson's} variant of the worm infected less than 7000 computers", yet somehow he is allegedly responsible for something like $100 million in damamges to MS.
From here, it looks like this is the guy they're going to sacrifice as an "example" for everyone else.
-- Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net Profanity is the one language all programmers know best.