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German Police Hold Computer Virus Suspect

Posted on: Saturday, 8 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

BERLIN - A high school student has been arrested in Germany on charges he created the "Sasser" computer virus that infected computers worldwide, an official said Saturday.

The 18-year-old unidentified suspect was arrested Friday and has told authorities he was responsible for the worm, said Frank Federau, a spokesman for the state criminal office in Hanover.

Police and prosecutors searched his parents' house in the northern town of Waffensen on Friday, Federau said. He said he did not have details of the suspect was tracked down.

Prosecutors handling the case could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday. The German weekly Der Spiegel reported, without citing sources, that the CIA and FBI also were involved in the hunt for the worm's creator, whom it identified as Sven J.

The worm spread around the world over the past week, exploiting a flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

Unlike most outbreaks, Sasser does not require users to activate it by clicking on an e-mail attachment. Once inside, the worm scans the Internet for others to attack, causing some computers to continually crash and reboot.

Sasser is known as a network worm because it can automatically scan the Internet for computers with the security flaw and send a copy of itself there.

On Monday, the worm hit public hospitals in Hong Kong and one-third of Taiwan's post office branches. Twenty British Airways flights were each delayed about 10 minutes Tuesday due to Sasser troubles at check-in desks, while British coast guard stations used pen and paper for charts normally generated by computer.

Home users were hit especially hard, computer security experts say, because they generally lack the know-how to install patches and tend not to have the firewalls needed to keep Sasser from spreading to other computers via the Internet.

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