Security firm hires teenage accused of writing Sasser virus
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Sven Jaschan, an 18-year-old from Waffensen in Lower Saxony, who is also thought to be behind the Netsky virus and is currently awaiting trial for writing the Sasser worm, could be about to start work with German firewall company Securepoint.
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German prosecutors have laid charges of computer sabotage, data manipulation and disruption of public systems against student Sven Jaschan who has admitted writing the Windows worm.
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Sven Jaschan, 18, from Germany, faces up to five years in prison for writing and spreading the Sasser and Netsky worms, said to have cost businesses around the world millions of pounds.
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Following his arrest in May, the teenage computer wizard admitted to police he wrote the code for Sasser and more than two dozen Netsky viruses that wreaked havoc across the Internet during the first few months of 2004.
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An unpatched flaw in antivirus software compromises student data in Colorado.
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A German teenager who created the Sasser worm that disrupted computers around the world in May has been charged with computer sabotage, prosecutors said Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - They just don't make malware like they used to. Or at least like they did earlier this year. Even low-quality malware, however, is taxing the resources of security companies, since it is being detected in ever-higher numbers. Over the last six months, the technical creativity of malware has fallen along with the ability to cause massive damage, such as that created by the MyDoom and Sasser worms of years past, wrote Alexander Gostev, senior virus analyst for Kaspersky Lab, in a recent report. Gostev's lab intermittently sees highly technical malware, but most is "the same unending stream of Trojans, viruses and worms," he wrote. In many cases, hackers simply take existing malware and create variants, by tweaking the older code to evade antivirus software. At times, the process is simple trial and error. Malware writers use online scanners such as Virustotal , which check to see if their new code will be detected by antivirus software, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for F-Secure. If the code is detectable, they can make a slight modification and run it through the scanner again. "I'd like to tell you that we're winning this war," Hypponen said. "But frankly, I'm not so sure. We need new kinds of solutions." Because much of the code is not new, it tends to remain effective for shorter periods of time before antivirus companies detect it. Still, the time it takes to identify and create a signature for a new virus, which can range from a few minutes to a few hours, is often long enough for hackers to infect computers. "Antivirus companies are working at the limits of their capabilities in terms of speed," Gostev wrote. To be sure, some malicious hackers are doing creative work. This year saw some sophisticated phishing attacks, and virus writers have been branching into relatively new areas like instant messaging and social networking sites, noted Christopher Boyd, security research manager for FaceTime Communications. But the trend overall, he said, has been "quantity over quality." Kaspersky Lab in Moscow is on the front lines of the battle. Its analysts added 2,000 signatures to their database in January 2005. Last month they added 10,000 signatures -- a five-fold increase, said Stanislav Shevchenko, head of the lab. The virus analysts work 12-hours shifts, pulling up screen after screen of rolling lines of code. Automated tools analyze some pieces of malware, but human analysis is still needed for others. A good analyst should process an average piece of malware within 5 minutes, Shevchenko said. But some of the rarer, more creative code is harder to crack. Polymorphic viruses -- ones that can change their byte sequences to throw off antivirus software -- can take up to a week to analyze, Shevchenko said. The signatures are added to a database used by Kaspersky's antivirus engine, which is licensed by other security vendors such as Juniper Networks, ClearSwift , and F-Secure. The increase in the volume of malicious code can be attributed in part to the impunity enjoyed by malware writers, said Eugene Kaspersky, head of antivirus research. Despite efforts by law enforcement agencies to strengthen international cooperation, most malware writers are never punished. "It's quite safe for them," Kaspersky said. "If they are clever enough, there is almost no risk for them at the moment." The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the country's KGB intelligence agency, frequently ask Kaspersky Lab for information, said Kaspersky spokesman Timur Tsoriev. The FSB, however, approaches Kaspersky less these days since the agency has bolstered its in-house expertise, Kaspersky said. Kaspersky said his lab focuses less on finding the root of criminal activity than protecting the company's customers. But the burden of rising online criminal activity directly impacts security companies, he said. "If there is no help from the police and if they don't reduce the number of criminals, I'm afraid the detection for all antivirus products will go down," Kaspersky said.
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Blog: While many people believe a 15-year old created the first computer virus in 1982, I'm not so quick to agree.
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Eighteen-year-old Sven Jaschan was indicted yesterday for allegedly creating the Sasser worm that crashed hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide after spreading over the Internet.
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SecurePoint says the alleged Sasser author was "just an immature boy with mindless intent" who wants to make amends.
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Blog: In what appears to be the first case of its kind, federal agents sent spyware called "CIPAV" to the owner of a MySpace account tied to e-mail bomb threats against a high school.
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By Stuart Arnold  A COMPUTER virus inadvertently helped police to catch a paedophile who accessed thousands of child porn images.
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Sven Jaschan, the alleged author of the Sasser worm and several variants of the Netsky virus, was charged this week by German police, but the informant who led authorities to the suspect will have to wait for a promised $250,000 reward, Microsoft
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"Sven Jaschan, self-confessed author of the Netsky and Sasser viruses, is responsible for 70 percent of virus infections in 2004, according to a six-month virus roundup published Wednesday by antivirus company Sophos."  "The 18-year-old Jaschan was taken into custody in Germany in May by police who said he had admitted programming both the Netsky and Sasser worms, something experts at Microsoft confirmed. (A Microsoft antivirus reward program led to the teenager's arrest.) During the five months preceding Jaschan's capture, there were at least 25 variants of Netsky and one of the port-scanning network worm Sasser."  "Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said it was staggeri ...
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Spanish police have arrested a 28-year-old man on charges that he created variants of the CommWarrior and Cabir mobile phone viruses, according to published reports.
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A 20-year-old student has been fined for participating in last year's cyberattack against Estonian Web sites.
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The FBI planted spyware on a 15-year-old boy's computer in Washington state to help finger him as the person responsible for a number of bomb threats e-mailed to his high school earlier this year.