Sasser author honoured
p2pnet.net News:- For the past five years, Britain’s silicon.com has run a feature revealing the people its panel – convened at its London offices – says are the driving forces in the tech industry.
“Some are household names, some you’ve never heard of. But they’ll all play a key role over the next year and remain influential long after,” it says of this year’s ‘winners’.
Silicon.com has four sections:
- Business Leaders
- Technologists
- Entrepreneurs
- Politicos
And there are some pretty interesting names in all categories. But the one we’re interested falls under the heading, Technologists. There, the real surprise is the 19-year-old nominated for the Number Four spot.
He’s none other than Sasser author Sven Jaschan, described simply as “virus writer” and who was recently indicted in Germany for computer espionage, and then hired by a German firewall security firm.
Here’s the full list
- Linus Torvalds, father of Linux
- Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft
- Jonathan Ive, VP of industrial design, Apple
- Sven Jaschan, virus writer
- Ian Foster, academic and grid computing guru
- Joe McGeehan, academic and wireless pioneer
- Donald E Knuth, professor emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University
- Jon Rubinstein, senior VP, Apple iPod division
- Mark J Cox, senior director of engineering, Red Hat
- Bernard C Soriano, technology task force leader, California Performance Review Commission
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UPDATE:- We had a couple of emails from people who are really upset that Jaschan is on the silicon.com list.
So before anyone has a heart-attack, it’s not really Jaschan who’s being honoured; it’s what he represents as, “the first person to be caught as a direct result of Microsoft’s virus bounty – the $250,000 sum put on the head of the writers of some of the worst viruses from the past 12 months”.
Oh. OK.
Read the rest of the rationalization here.
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See:-
driving forces – Agenda Setters 2004
security firm – Sasser author hired, p2pnet, September 20, 2004
September 29th, 2004 at 2:39 am
exactly how was he a “driving force”? The whole idea baffles me. I find it ludicris that someone who had a hand in reeking havoc upon the internet should get an honour – these judges smoking something funny?
Am I the only one who thinks that people who take advantage of exploits should be tared and feathered?
September 29th, 2004 at 3:27 am
If the “update” is supposed to mitigate Jaschan’s inclusion, it fails. In my opinion, he is on the list as a pr trick.
September 29th, 2004 at 5:35 am
I don’t agree… yeah sure sasser was inconvienient, but it wasn’t exactly destructive, was it? It only degraded performance, took some PC’s offline, tried to stop itself from being removed, but as far as I know it didn’t destroy any data…
So a few system operators had to work out how to clean it from their systems. SO WHAT? Should the people of the world keep their heads in the sand, thinking they are secure, until someone writes a virus that actually does contain a destructive payload? I’d rather have to deal with cleaning up sasser than have to deal with complete loss of my data and/or loss of all the money held in my electronic bank accounts.
By writing Sasser, Sven has helped people become more aware of security on the internet, and shown how vunerable Micro$oft’s shoddy software is – that is certainly a “driving force”. Bill Gates should be the one tared and feathered for selling us an operating system that allowed this to happen.
September 29th, 2004 at 8:23 am
so everytime a “bully” comes along and kicks over your sandcastle you should award them a medal and blame the bucket/shovel manufacturer for creating a cruddy product?
truth is there was a patch for sasser before there was an exploit for it. So to blame microcrap for a crappy product is mute in this case. Missing the point of why it’s wrong to award prizes to people who take advantage of vulnerbilities, regardless of what they are. By doing so you send the message it’s ok to fuck with someones computer – I’m sorry that to me is the wrong message to be sending to these script kiddies. Just like hiring them sends the wrong message. In fact a recent virus that was released contained a message, “looking 4 work” (along those lines).
And it wasn’t a few IT’s who had to patch a few computers, it was millions of computers infected costing millions of dollars in time and energy to clean systems out and patch them.
I don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t run windows update often enough and get infected (cause it can be put on automatic update) but I refuse to believe someone who takes advantage of others should be awarded any prize much less being on a list of those considered for one, no matter how crappy the product is.
How up-to-date are you in regards to computer security? these days you almost have to be a dectective/IT/sys admin/security guru to keep up with all of the exploits out there. How often do you read bugtraq? Would you even know where to begin to deal with some of the more malicious malware that is out there?
-anne
September 29th, 2004 at 8:53 am
And from the point of view of the security companies
a continued stream of dangerous virus is necessary
to keep them in business.
If there were less exploits and malicious code,
they could less justify the need for their services.
Problems for some make opportunities for others.
September 29th, 2004 at 11:13 am
It’s sort of like Time making the Ayatollah man of the year (I think in the 30’s Hitler was once Time’s man of the year) – It’ s not necessarily an “honor” to say you’ve “had an impact,” but given that all the other person’s mentioned were people who had a positive impact, it’s a pr trick.