According to
media reports, a
Finnish court has sentenced two teenagers to pay fines after it was
found they had published harmful viruses and Trojan horses on their
websites.
The Riihimäki District Court found the young men, who are 17 and
19 years old, had copied the unnamed malicious programs from
elsewhere on the internet, and published links to other websites
containing harmful code. The 19-year-old was also alleged to have
broken into the websites of two organisations, after receiving
usernames and passwords from his younger friend.
The District Court determined that publishing links to the
malicious websites was against the law. One of the men was also
said to have published viral source code on his website, which
could be used to create brand new viruses and Trojan horses.
The offences are said to have taken place in 2004. Under the
District Court's sentence the 17-year old will have to pay a 360
Euros fine, and his older accomplice 300 Euros.
"The court in Finland has concluded that these two young men
were not primarily motivated by a desire to cause damage or
trouble, which is good news for the offenders as they have escaped
with relatively small fines," said Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant for Sophos. "It's a shame that the size of
the punishment against these teenagers is unlikely to act as a
deterrent to others. As organized criminal gangs increasingly use
malware to make money, kids would be wise to avoid getting mixed up
in the computer underground."
Companies are recommended to protect their email with a consolidated solution to thwart the virus, spyware
and spam threats and secure their desktops and servers with
automatically updated anti-virus protection.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.