New viruses, worms, trojans, adware and spyware are published almost every day. Phishing schemes became more prevalent in 2004 and more profitable for the criminals behind them. If you had an e-mail address, then you bore witness to the Bagel-Netsky-MyDoom dominance war, the latest Phishing forgeries asking you to update your bank account records or eBay profiles, and your computer is likely now running some sort of AdWare program.

Here is something to assuage your suffering.

From the Earth Times

On Friday Judge Pechman sentenced Parson to 18 months in jail and 10 months of community service for propagating the crippling MS Blaster Internet worm in 2003 that wrought havoc on up to 50000 computers around the world with both personal and business pc's affected.

It's not a huge victory ("Citing parental neglect and psychological problems" the Judge offered a leniant sentance) but any small victory against these criminals is a step forward.

Add this to the roll of the recently convicted black hats, such as the Lowe's Hardware hacker who recently received a nine year sentence, or the AOL spammers that also received a nine year sentence.

Posted by Michael at January 29, 2005 11:55 AM