08-29-2003 06:11:55 AM CST -- By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer

U.S. cyber investigators have identified a teenager as one author of a damaging virus-like infection unleashed weeks ago on the Internet and plan to arrest him early Friday, a U.S. official confirmed. The 18-year-old was accused of writing a version of the damaging "Blaster" computer infection that spread quickly across the Internet, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official asked that further identifying information about the teenager not be disclosed until the arrest. Further details were expected to be disclosed Friday by the FBI and U.S. attorney's office in Seattle, which has been leading the investigation.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office there, John Hartingh, said there had been "no arrest made in this matter yet." He declined to comment further. A witness reportedly saw the teen testing the infection and called authorities, the official said. Collectively, different versions of the virus-like worm, alternately called "LovSan" or "Blaster," snarled corporate networks worldwide, forcing Maryland's motor vehicle agency to close for one day. The infection inundated networks and frustrated home users. Symantec Corp., a leading antivirus vendor, said the worm and its variants infected more than 500,000 computers worldwide. Experts consider it one of the worst outbreaks this year. The "Blaster.B" version of the infection, which began spreading Aug. 13, was remarkably similar to the original Blaster worm that first struck two days earlier; experts said the author made few changes, renaming the infecting-file from "msblast" to an anatomical reference....continued....

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if guilty lets hope he go's to prison...and is made... someones bitch

Pity its prolly not the mastermind behind it all. As they say he was able to acquire it and then changed the code a little.

Still, the guy should be punished accordingly.

teekid(guy who got cought) is a big guy..it will be more like him making others his bitch

from minnesota... a state away from me, so I heard on the news. I can't remember what city/town though...

All I know is all of these guys involved with the worm ruined a great exploit

Im very happy !! hope they kill him with gas

I find it intesting to see the views previously stated as they tend to be more the same than different.

Yet how many of you have never played or learned about a technology that went farther than you intended? Don't get me wrong I'm not putting up a defense for this rather large guy, just posing the question.

For me, sure I've *ucked up. It was unintentional, but other than my word, there is no way to determine intent.

Hello fastlanwan long time no see

I can see where your point is going but he created a variant... what did he expect that the variant with only a few bytes difference would behave quite differently and the infection wouldn't spread so far?

T33kid was just messing around. The actual infection of his variant of the blaster worm was grossly exagerated by the media and the government. The original blaster writer was stupid as well.... if he was smart he would have pointed the worm's ddos attack at the real windows update site so they couldn't point the dns elseware. If anyone should be gas'd it should be Bill Gates for realeasing code with *HUGE* flaws in it like this rpc exploit, which btw has just spawned 3 more exploits according to microsoft on september 10th.