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Sasser
On the evening of his 18th birthday, a teenager from a tiny village in northern Germany clicked ‘send’ on his computer. Within three hours, the postal service in Taiwan was in chaos, computers in hospitals and banks in Hong Kong had crashed, and trains in Australia and the USA had stopped.
In court a few months later, the teenager, Sven Jaschan, was charged with criminal damage. He was found guilty of putting the terrible ‘Sasser’ computer virus on the Internet and received a 21-month suspended sentence. He avoided prison because he only eighteen when he committed the crime. The virus infected millions of computer systems across the world, and caused millions of dollars of damage.
Sven admitted his guilt to the detectives who came to his home last year. He had spent an enormous amount of time creating the Sasser virus on the computer in his bedroom. He often spent ten hours a day in front of his computer but his parents hadn’t known what he was doing at the time.
When he released the virus on the Internet, he didn’t realise it would cause so much damage. He was just delighted that it had worked. ‘I felt as if I had written a first-class essay’, said Sven. ‘I told my classmates – they thought it was terrific.’ But his feelings changed very quickly. He was terrified when he saw a TV news report about the virus and the damage it had caused.
Detectives arrested Sven after one of his classmates contacted Microsoft and told them about him. Microsoft had offered a $250,000 reward for information about the virus. However, Sven’s teachers at school were astonished that Sven had created the virus. They said that he wasn’t a brilliant computer student. ‘There are others in the class who are better than him,’ one teacher said!
While he was waiting for his trial to start, Sven left school and started work. He now works for a computer company, making ‘firewalls’ – vital pieces of software that protect computers from viruses.
