Sasser Worm Creator Reinforces Hacker Stereotypes Everywhere

from the setting-the-hacker-image-back-a-decade dept

Just about everyone has already commented about the fact that German authorities, with the help of Microsoft (and their reward money), tracked down the 18-year-old creator of the Sasser worm, so all that I'll add to the story is that this kid seems to so exactly fits the stereotype of the classic hacker kid that anyone hoping to reform that image had just had their work made much more difficult. Here we have a teenager who lives at home with his parents, and created the worm for fun and still doesn't quite understand why everyone's making such a big deal out of it.
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  • identicon
    Matt, 10 May 2004 @ 4:22am

    rewards for hackers

    I suppose its cheaper for MS to pay someone $250k to rat on a hacker who finds an exploit, than to have their team of developers actually trawl through the code and fix it

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Mikester, 10 May 2004 @ 9:08am

      Re: rewards for hackers

      That's a silly comment. MS did exactly that, which is what led to the creation of the worm in the first place. MS released a patch for the exploit in April, once it was known what the exploit was, the hacker created the worm to take advantage of those who were slow to patch their computers.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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