MSBlast suspect pleads guilty

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The thing is that someone has to come forward or turn them in!

I have watched this going on since November 3, 1988 (Morris Worm) and in many cases, the people have to come forward or they won't get caught. There have been a lot of script kiddies, but those that do major damage could stay in the shadows and never get caught unless they want to come out into the light.

It is only after they come forward that you will hear anything interesting beyond the damage in financial figures. The first one that I mentioned, the Morris Worm, exploited a bug in SunOS 4, though many these days go after easier targets (Windows hosts) and most professional hackers will tell you that it takes about 30 seconds to break into one of these boxes!

The financial damage so far is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, but the people who release these things into the wild will probubly never pay more than a few years, if that! That is just how it works.

It was speculated by No_Ax_to_Grind (iirc) that these people would turn on each other for financial gain (as in Microsoft reward money), but that has not worked so far. So now, we are looking at figures like:

Code Red (2001): $2.6 billion (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-08-31-code-red-costs.htm)
SirCam (2002): $1 billion (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,590320,00.asp)
Clean up costs for 2001: $10.7 billion (http://www.cs.nmt.edu/~cs491_02/IA/viruscost.htm)
LoveBug cost companies $960 million in clean-up costs and $7.7 billion in lost productivity. (http://news.com.com/Lessons+of+'Love'+virus+still+sinking+in/2100-1001_3-257095.html)

Don't expect virus authors to pay this, it is on the corporations and users to cover these costs!

Posted by: B.O.F.H.   Posted on: 08/11/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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