Worm Writer Identified?

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,36168,00.html

by Lynn Burke
3:40 p.m. May. 5, 2000 PDT

A computer virus expert at the University of Stockholm announced
Friday evening that he had identified the creator of the pernicious
"Love Bug" worm that has wreaked havoc on computer systems worldwide.

The alleged culprit, whose purported screen name is "Spyder," has been
identified as a male, Philippines-based, German student in his 20s
whose first name is Michael.

Swedish media credited Fredrik Bjrck, the same researcher in the
university's Computer Science Department who helped track down the
30-year-old New Jersey man who wrote the "Melissa" virus, with tracing
the alleged malcontent.

Police and internet service providers said earlier Friday that the
virus appeared to originate in the Philippines, and said its author
may be a young man living in a Manila suburb.

Researchers have gathered their information from the digital clues the
virus writer left behind.

The most important of those clues was left in the source code of the
worm, and indicated that the virus had originated in the Philippines
and was written by someone using an email account with Supernet, a
prepaid ISP in that country.

A representative from Access Net Inc., the company that owns Supernet,
said the author was a "crafty" person who buzzed around the network
like a fly, making it difficult to pin him down.

The bug, which began appearing sometime on Wednesday in emails titled
"ILOVEYOU," has since shown up in several variations, including
"joke," "Very Funny," and "Mother's Day."

The "Mother's Day" variant is said to be even worse than the Melissa
virus, which first surfaced on March 26 after it was posted to a
Usenet news group in the alt.sex hierarchy inside an infected
Microsoft Word file.

The Defense Department said Friday that the worm had contaminated at
least four classified U.S. military computer systems, but said the
problems were quickly isolated and the impact was minimal.

The one sector of the business world that appears to be benefiting
from the security disaster, naturally, is the security industry.
Security company stock prices jumped Thursday, and continued to rise
Friday along with the Nasdaq, which closed 2.6 percent higher to
3,816.

Reuters contributed to this report.


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