Security news
Security news30 June 2004
Hungarian teen sentenced for distributing Magold worm, Sophos comments
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| A screensaver of Hungarian porn star Maya Gold was used as bait for unsuspecting users. |
According to media reports, a Hungarian court, located in Veszprem, has found male teenager László Kovács guilty of infecting computers with the memory-resident W32/Magold-A worm. László Kovács's punishment is two years probation for unauthorised use of computers as well as being ordered to pay 500,000 forints (about £1300) towards his court costs.
Magold-A, first seen in May 2003, spreads by email, IRC, network shared drives and peer-to-peer network shares. In its email form, it arrived as the attachment to a Hungarian message, which translates:
Subject line: Maya Gold screensaver
Message Text: Dear addressee
To increase the view index of EROTICA.LAP.HU here is a little preview for Internet users. The attached 'Maya Gold.scr' file is a screensaver.
As its name says, this contains several pictures about the porn actress Maya Gold. It is recommended that first you save the attached file on your harddisk and you run it from there.
If you have any problems or any questions, please send an e-mail to the following address: erotica@lap.hu
Attached file: Maya Gold.scr
According to daily newspaper Nepszabadsag, the teenager explained to the court that he created Magold-A to prove that he had some skills after failing several subjects at his high school in Ajka, a town about 100 miles south-west of Budapest.
"László Kovács fits in very well with our profile of a virus writer: he is male, young, and wanting to show off his computer skills," said Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos. "The promise of sexy pictures as a method of luring innocent computer users to open a file is not new, but it is unfortunately effective. To remain untouched by such viruses, people are advised to run up-to-date anti-virus protection and avoid opening unsolicited email attachments."
It has been reported that investigators were able to track down the teenager because he had used his own email address to send out some of the infected messages.
