By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 11 May 2004, 07:51

MICROSOFT SPENT $25,000 to catch the Sasser worm virus writer by the simple ruse of paying his mates to grass him up.

Apparently five friends of Sven Jaschan approached Microsoft and asked about the $5 million fund that Vole has for virus bounties.

The eighteen year old faces five years in federal German clink.

Initially it was thought that Jaschlan operated alone but German police have since arrested another man over the virus in Rotenburg, North Germany.

According to German prosecutors, Jaschan told them that he only wrote the worm to help his Mum's nascent "PC Help" business.

It is also suspected that he was trying to top the efforts of other programmers by creating a superior worm but had been surprised by the damage he caused.

Neither Jaschan nor his mother have made any comments.

Mum’s business returns an answer phone message saying no one is home to answer PC Help questions.

But Jaschan's dad, Rainer and his stepmother Sabine, have been a tad more forthcoming. They told RTL TV that the teenager had no intention of causing damage and was actually working on antidotes. C'T magazine reported the other day that the lad is part of a group of kids working on anti-virus viruses.

Jaschan said he really wanted to develop an antidote to the virus. He said he didn't want to cause any damage. About four months ago he told Sabine and Rainer that he had written a worm, and when his dad asked him if he had done anything dumb he laughed nervously, and that was all he said.

Dad gave him a stern ticking off about the perils of writing worms and Jaschan assured him he would never do anything destructive. This tale is a little different from the image portrayed by VoleLawyer chief brief Brad Smith who said that the suspect was believed responsible "for the creation of all 28 variants of the Netsky virus."

The German press is speculating that Jaschan might be dealt with quite leniently. The maximum penalty is five years and he was only 17 when the crimes were committed. There is also a fair bit of support for him.

One leading German newspaper, Die Welt said in a page one editorial on Monday there was a strange sense of national pride that a German student had outwitted the world's best computer experts. [Are you sure about this? Ed.]

"Many of the (German) journalists who travelled to the province could not help but harbour clandestine admiration for the effectiveness if the worm," the paper said.

But Jaschan could face damage law suits from many companies throughout the world who were shut down by the virus and that could set his mum’s business back a bit.

What's the moral of the story? No-one knows.

The Inquirer