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| Jeffrey Lee Parson is suspected of having written
and distributed a variant of the Blaster worm |
According to several media reports, Jeffrey Lee Parson, the
Minnesota teenager who allegedly released a variant of the Blaster
worm, Blaster-B,
in August last year, is scheduled to appear this week before a
federal judge in Seattle. Since his arrest on 29 August
2003, Parson has pleaded not guilty to one count of
intentionally causing damage to non-public computers used by the
Government of the United States, but authorities expect this plea
to change.
A change-of-plea hearing was put on the court calendar for US
District Judge Marsha Pechman. "Our expectation is that he will
plead guilty, but until it actually happens we won't know for
sure," said Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for Seattle's US
attorney's office, on Friday.
W32/Blaster-B is functionally equivalent to its predecessor but
creates a file called teekids.exe - rather than msblast.exe - in
the Windows system folder. The code also includes some offensive
text which is directed towards Microsoft and the anti-virus
industry. Reports claim that Parson, who is believed to use the
online handle "teekid" or "t33kid", admitted at the time of his
arrest, to modifying the original Blaster worm and launching it on
the internet.
"These so-called script-kiddies, who modify existing viruses and
release them into the wild, are a serious cause for concern," said
Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos. "Their amended
versions can cause as much havoc as the originals they tweak, yet
some of them might expect to get away with a lighter sentence
simply because they are not the initial author. It is important to
remember that in many countries, writing viral code is not illegal,
but allowing it to infect computers is punishable by law."
The original Blaster worm accounted for more than 15% of
the virus reports to Sophos in 2003, but the variant linked to
Parson was not as prevalent.
"We need to keep this case in perspective," continued Theriault.
"The Blaster-B variant didn't spread with anything like as much
ferocity as the original. Blaster-A's author has yet to be tracked
down, despite the bounty on his or her head. It's important that
Parson is punished for his wrongdoing, and not be made a scapegoat
for the whole Blaster epidemic."
Reports state that since his arrest, Parson has been out of jail
on $25,000 bail and has been under electronic home monitoring.
A report by Monica Soto Ouchi of the Seattle Times paints a sad
picture of the difficulties Parson and his parents have faced since
the arrest last year.
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