Zotob computer worm author received prison sentences

The Sale City Court in Morocco yesterday sentenced two men convicted of spreading Zotob computer worms last year.

Farid Essebar - a 19-year-old science student - and Achraf Bahloul - 22 - was sentenced to 2 and 1 year imprisonment for programming and spreading Zotob worms to attack systems running operating Windows 2000. This virus created a pandemic last year.

The Moroccan government also said that the two criminals mentioned above also had an accomplice named Atilla Ekici living in Turkey. The FBI and Microsoft were the two partners that helped Morocco in identifying and discovering these two criminals exactly 12 days after the outbreak of the Zotob worm.

Meanwhile, the FBI and law enforcement agencies in the Middle East had to work together in an international campaign to hunt down the conspiracy to spread the worm. The result of this campaign was that a total of 16 suspects were arrested.

This result prompted security analysts to warn legal guardians of a war with computer virus programmers in the "underground" digital world.

The two criminals said they programmed the Zotob worm to want to prove their talent and technical knowledge to their friends and opponents. However, their results have caused an unintended consequence. Zotob worm has hit hard on some of the major media in the world.

CNN is one of the most heavily affected media carriers because of the Zotob computer worm infection. CNN's system has been deactivated for a period of time. Total Zotob worm damage to more than 100 US companies.

So far the distribution of Zotob worm seems to be blocked, but the worm has consistently reached the list of the most dangerous malicious codes of the security companies of the month.

Hoang Dung