Surprises

Surprises

by Mike Masnick




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.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1. May 10th, 2004 @ 4:22am

    rewards for hackers

    by Matt

    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

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. May 10th, 2004 @ 9:08am

    Re: rewards for hackers

    by Mikester

    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.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie
  • Plain Text: A CRLF will be replaced by break <br> tag, all other allowable HTML is intact
  • HTML: No formatting of any kind is done without explicitly being written in
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <p> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>
Close
Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie

Search Techdirt
And now, a word from our Sponsors..



Subscribe to Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Related Stories
Close
E-mail It