Blaster Writer Caught

Henry V .009 writes "The FBI will be arresting an 18 year-old in connection with MS Blaster, reports The Washington Post." According to the article, the teen was witnessed testing the worm, and then turned in by a bystander. It's also worth noting that this is merely one of the Blaster variations. Hope whoever it was had fun, because a world of pain is waiting in store now.

A witness turned him in?!?

How on Earth do you witness somebody writing a virus?

He's sitting in front of a computer, hitting keys on the keyboard and looking at the monitor. That describes the person who wrote this story, the person who submitted this story, the person who posted the story, me getting first post, and everybody reading and moderating this and every other post to come.

It also describes RMS writing Emacs, Linus debugging the kernel, and SCO issuing another press release.

Did this witness actually read the code? What kind of idiot virus-writer lets someone he doesn't know pull up a chair and start auditing his code?

Or was the witness tipped off when the screen start flashing "NOW TESTING VIRUS"? Damn, I hate when that happens!

This doesn't sound quite right.

Huh huh, he said penis...

Reread the article. They didn't bust the original author. They busted the lamewad that renamed msblast.exe to penis32.exe -- all he did was modify the existing virus.

Granted, the dipshit _touched_ the virus code and released a variant (albeit an extremely unoriginal one)

It was probably about as difficult as hex-editing a file. Gee. 5 minutes of dicking around is going to get him a life long prison ass pounding. Way to go, Genius.

And of course the uninformed media is going to paint the dumb bastard to be THE msblast author. Can anyone say "Scapegoat?"

Re:Huh huh, he said penis...

There is also a possability they busted someone who was just discecting blaster not making a new varent.

To a techno neophite there isn't much diffrence. If the guy decompiled the code and his friend looked over his sholder his friend would see someone with the blaster source.
Decompillers aren't so well known now a days so even an experenced programmer who might normally know what he is looking at might not recognise this as decompiler output and not original source code.

He might also not realise you generally can not recompile decompiled code.

Or the busted teen is an idiot who said "Hay watch this. I got blaster. Now I'm chaning it to penis32. Aren't I clever?"

Re:Huh huh, he said penis...

In all fairness, the MS engineers did notice the flaw over a month before anyone exploited it, and patches have been available. My Windows XP machine here was fine throughout.

Maybe you should take them to court for creating 'del' - I imagine that's erased far more files than any virus ever has!

The problem, as ever, is *how* you use something, and it was the virus writers who abused the system.

Then again, maybe you could blame the millions of people out there who failed to keep their computers patched and updated, but that's another story...

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

How on Earth do you witness somebody writing a virus?

Maybe they were following the XP-methodology [extremeprogramming.org] and were pair programming [extremeprogramming.org]?

interestingly, The Virus had a GPL licence

It turns out the virus had been released under a GPL licence. It was open source. The kid made some changes so he was REQUIRED by the GPL to release them.

But you are of course obliged to make a good faith efferot test your software and make sure it does not have simple bugs, compiles and runs before you release it. The kid was obviously just releasing his testing his changes prior to releasing the source as he was required to do under the GPL.

all viruses should be GPL. THen bill gates will really be right.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

I saw Sarah Good writing the virus! I saw Goody Osborne writing the virus!

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

The sad thing is they'll fail to catch the original Blaster author so they'll throw the book at this kid for the whole Blaster thing.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

The sad thing is they'll fail to catch the original Blaster author so they'll throw the book at this kid for the whole Blaster thing.

This seems to be the prevailing sentiment here and honestly, it's making you all look like a bunch of script kiddies, or at the very least script kiddie sympathizers.

Fact is this 18 year old "kid" (actually, adult in this country) committed a crime if he wrote this virus variant and distributed it. While he's still innocent until proven guilty, I fail to see how it's "sad" to get any virus writer - big or small - out of the virus writing business.

This is the way law enforcement works. You can't catch everybody who commits a crime, and if you don't show that you're actively enforcing the law, there will be more criminals. Study after study after study have shown this to be the absolute truth. Even if they don't catch the writer of the original Blaster, catching this guy and making an example out of him - as well as any other virus writers they no doubt will catch in the future - will act as something of a deterrent. You're all operating under the assumption that this guy is a small-fry writing viruses in his spare time - you think it's worth it to a guy like that to risk jail time? No, and this will cause others like him to think twice.

Obvious analogy - when there aren't any cops around, I see a lot of people run red lights. When there is a cop stationed at an intersection, I see nobody running red lights. Funny how that works.

And if his punishment is harsh, so what? If he's found guilty, he's a criminal. He deserves whatever he gets at that point. People need to take responsibility for their own actions and realize that their actions have consequences, both for the people they directly affect (ie. those infected by this variant of the Blaster virus) and for themselves. You'd think Slashdot readers would have a little more grasp of this concept than most (being open-source advocates), but it appears this may not be the case.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

By your rationale, we should start caning graffiti artists in the US because that would be "something of a deterrent."
It's not a matter of whether he is guilty or not, but whether he is going to get a punishment that will fit the crime.
I wouldn't be surprised if the media makes this out into another Kevin Mitnick [kevinmitnick.com] scenario.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

By your rationale, we should start caning graffiti artists in the US because that would be "something of a deterrent."

I don't think the parent poster made any comments about WHAT the punishment should be, so please don't start citing rather harsh treatments to make your argument look more interesting. You could have just as easily made the statement, "By your rationale, we should start putting graffiti artists in jail for a month because that would be 'something of a deterrent.'".

Anyway, consider the fact that even though this guy only modified an existing virus, his crimes are EXACTLY the same as those of the original programmer. Writing a virus isn't a crime. Unleashing it and causing damage (economic or physical) to the property of others IS a crime. By modifying the virus, he created a new pattern that virus scanners would not recognize and thus was able to create similar damage as that of the original virus. Please explain to me how this isn't as bad as what the original author did.

My argument, by the way, is similar to ones made against the DMCA. The DMCA is being used to prosecute people who construct devices that CAN by used to circumvent copy protection. However, I think most of us agree that the real culprits are those that use it for such. In the case of viruses, if I construct a new virus, but never let it loose, am I guilty? If you manage to swipe a copy of the virus while you're at a LAN party at my house and then let it loose, aren't you the guilty one? If both of us unleash copies of the virus, aren't we both guilty?

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

>And if his punishment is harsh, so what? If he's found guilty, he's a criminal. He deserves whatever he gets at that point.

NO NO NO NO! He deserves a punishment fitting the crime. If he wrote one variant, he should NOT be incriminated based on the damage done by ALL the variants. Sure he should get into serious trouble. Sure he should probably do some jail time. But my fear is that people will get carried away because of all the virus/worm activity lately and give him a lot worse than he's due. We'd like to think the justice system is above that, but sadly thats not always the case.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

And if his punishment is harsh, so what? If he's found guilty, he's a criminal.

Not quite; it just means he doesn't have as good a lawyer as the prosecution.

Re:you are clueless or evil.

The logic here is unbelieveable. So if you forget to lock a window in your home, and a burglar comes in and steals your stuff, and the burglar gets caught, YOU should be prosecuted for burglary for leaving the window open?

Yeah, some might say YOU should be more careful for not locking the window... but the REAL criminal still is the burglar that took your stuff! M$ has some serious problems, but that doesn't mean we should lose all of our common sense JUST to attack them some more.

Does M$ software have security issues? Yeah. Should script kiddies be let off easy because they take advantage of these problems? No. They are no better than the burglar that entered your unlocked window!

We need to start making people take responsibility for their own ACTIONS and quit blaming others. It's like blaming a door-lock manufacturer because someone can pick the lock! There will always be people that take UNLAWFUL advantage of real or perceived situations. That doesn't mean they are any less to blame for their actions.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

He could have been dumb enough to test it on a computer lab at school, or at a library. The "witness" could have been a network administrator monitoring the system.

Of course the witness was also last seen purchasing a shark tank and some laser beams...

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

...an arrest has not yet been made...

Well, if he does read /., I'm sure he's busy running a big frickin magnet over his hard drive(s) right about now...

Misprison of a felony

Look it up, amigo. If you know about a felony and you don't report it, you are guilty of cover-up and can serve time for your avoidance of doing the right thing.

You have an amazingly rosy view of how the law works in this country. You must be those law-abiding citizens with nothing to fear that I keep hearing about. When we have laws that will revoke habeas corpus for the bizarre and impossible crime of loitering with space aliens (1982, Department of defense appropriations bill) and the hard-hitting "conspiracy of one", you can and will go down for anything if they want you.

Do you think it's an accident that we have the largest prison population, in absolute and relative terms, in the world?

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

What is with this whole 'virgin' preocupation? Why is anyone concerned with this kid's (or any kid's) level of sexual activity? I don't understand.

...beacause it's still a socially-acceptable way to stereotype and belittle young men. You would never hear of people using the term "18 year-old girl, probably still a virgin" in similar circumstances. It's hypocrasy, ignorance and spitefullness.

Belittling ourselves

Actually, considering the self-deprecating humour on slashdot, I wouldn't read too much into it. How many of us have joked about "slashdot readers being virgins." Mainly because we have a large geeky population, and many (but not all) of said geeky population lack the social skills to properly interface with members of the same gender, let alone the opposite sex.

The virgin isn't really a reference to sexual activity per-se, so much as it is a reference to the fact that somebody with so much a lack of a "life" probably is very likely sitting in front of a PC 24/7 and not meeting women.

Actually, sounds a lot like me in High School. Except that I didn't write viruses (custom backdoors to deal with people in the lab I didn't like, yes, but the teachers knew and found it amusing), and I now do have a social/sex life in addition to geeky pursuits.

Of course... another trademark of my geekdom is that said social life usually falls on the backburner whenever the newest Final Fantasy or RPG comes out... luckily the g/f is into 'em too (though I haven't gotten her on Warcraft/Starcraft or FPS yet).

Re:Belittling ourselves

I've generally found that people making fun of "18 year old virgins" are, themselves, 20+ year old virgins.

Prisoner rape is funny, ha ha

Ha ha, yes, it is quite amusing to be sent to prison for a nonviolent offense (typing on a keyboard, for instance) and subsequently violently raped repeatedly by multiple large black men while the guards stand by and laugh and the prison wardens make no effort to keep it from happening. We will be sure to laugh heartily when you, your brother, father, son, uncle and/or cousins are sentenced to 30 days for some minor offense which they may or may not have committed. We will chuckle about the fact that they have a very good chance of coming home broken and scarred physically and psychologically by their horrifying experiences. Ha ha ha.

Rape is immoral. Rape is inhuman. Rape is cruel and unusual punishment, and we have laws against that. I always find it entertaining how our entire prison establishment feels these laws are unimportant, and our culture thinks that jokes about young, weak, and sometimes innocent people getting forcibly sodomized is a fabulous thing to joke about. Wait, no, I don't find it entertaining. I find it makes me sick to my stomach.

It's also heartening to see every prison rape joke getting a +5, Funny. Thank you, moderators. Great way to get karma. Keep up the good work.

Help Stop Prisoner Rape [spr.org] by not treating it like a joke.

Re:Prisoner rape is IRRELEVANT. . . .

On the other hand, nobody ever said prison was supposed to be all Tea and Crumpets, either: it's punishment for crimes committed and convicted. .

The punishment is incarceration, it is NOT sodomy. I have never heard a judge say in his/her verdict, "and I convict the defendant to 5 years of incarceration, with the occasional guy holding him down and taking him anally". NO. It's against the law. Just because it's prison, it doesn't mean it's alright to break laws. Gee, if that's the case, you could slip small boys into the prison for the whole yard to have a little fun with, jesus.

Re:Generalizations about black men are funny ha ha

Actually, prison rape is a very racial thing. He was completely right to point out that it would almost certainly be large black men doing the raping. You see, the black gangs, and the Hispanic gangs, do not let anybody (else) touch members of their own race. The whites fail to form such gangs, and are victimized. Often the youngest white males, usually in for some sort of first time drug offence, are in the most danger. Check out the article Hard Time [amren.com] by Jared Taylor.

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

All virus/worm/trojan writers use MovieOS where stuff like "Assembling Virus" and "Testing Virus" are written to the screen in blinking fonts.

Didn't you ever see Swordfish? ;-)

Re:A witness turned him in?!?

You mean this Movie OS [userfriendly.org]?