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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Prosecutors in Verden, Germany, indicted an 18-year-old student on Wednesday for allegedly creating the Sasser worm that crashed hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide after spreading at lighting speed over the Internet.
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Berlin - A German teenager accused of creating the Sasser worm that infected millions of computers around the world is being taught to become a security software programmer, the company that hired him said on Friday.
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A 17-year-old was arrested after authorities received a tip that he was making threats in an online chat room about his high school, fellow students and an
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A year on, and the company's $1 million tip-off program has nabbed just one virus writer. Is it a bust?
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UK Police have arrested a 20-year old man in Preston on suspicion of stealing source code from Cisco Systems. The arrest under violation of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, follows Cisco&#39;s admission in May that
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Prosecutors in Verden, Germany, indicted an 18-year-old student on Wednesday for allegedly creating the Sasser worm that crashed hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide
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German prosecutors say a teenager has confessed to creating the virulent Sasser computer virus. Authorities say Sven Jaschan is believed also to be responsible for the Netsky virus.
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A teenager was sentenced Friday to 1 1/2 years in prison for unleashing an Internet worm that crippled 48,000 computers in 2003.
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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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A federal judge sentenced a teenager to  a year and half of prison on Friday for releasing a variant of  the Blaster worm that was used to attack more than 48,000  computers.
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$133K salary awaits Fujacks fiend A Chinese virus writer sent to jail for four years earlier this week has being offered a well-paying job by one of his victims.â¦
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A German computer security firm has defended its decision to hire the self-confessed teenage author of the Sasser and Netsky worms.
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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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The federal agency took the action to finger teen as the person behind a rash of bomb threats e-mailed to his high school, court documents revealed this week.
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A software developer whose program was accidentally labeled a threat is considering action against the antivirus company.
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Also: New Zealand teen runs internet banking scam. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.