Four Israeli teenagers, aged 15 and 16, are under house arrest
in Tel Aviv after admitting that they wrote and released Goner, a
worm that managed to spread throughout computers worldwide last
week despite its low level of sophistication.
The damage the worm has caused to date by flooding and
temporarily crippling mail servers and deleting anti-virus files
has been estimated at around $5 million.
The head of Israel’s police computer crime squad, Meir Zohar,
told reporters: “They are not bandits; they are regular kids. They
are not computer geniuses, although one of them could write a
program. I don’t think they fully understood what they were
doing.”
The country’s law provides a maximum sentence of two and a half
years imprisonment for the crime of writing and spreading computer
viruses when committed by juveniles, half of the sentence which
would be applicable to adults.
The youths appear to have been caught by security experts who
traced the IP address of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel which
they set up to control the worm. The experts monitored the channel
and passed the information to the FBI which then contacted Israel’s
authorities.
