On the 26th September, prosecutors in Seattle announced the arrest of a juvenile for "intentionally causing damage and attempting to cause damage to protected computers," in connection with the release of one of the variants of the Blaster worm.
This is, possibly, the third arrest in connection with a variant of the Blaster worm. The first was Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18 of Hopkins, Minnesota, USA. He has pleaded not guilty and will next appear in court on 17 November. Previous virus writers who were charged, including David L Smith, Christopher Pile and Simon Vallor have pleaded guilty, so this could become an important test case.
The second arrest was reported to be of Dan Dumitru Ciobanu in Romania, but authorities have since said that no arrest has occurred.
Interestingly, the original author of W32/Blaster.A, has not been identified or arrested. W32/Blaster.A was the first and most widespread variant, and all later variants were derived from it.
"It is common for a successful virus to be followed by various minor variants, often written by people with not enough technical skills to write a virus from scratch", said Allan Dyer, Chief Consultant for Yui Kee Computing. "In this case, the copy-cats were caught by the authorities' search for the originator, presumably they were also less able at covering their tracks. It can only be a good thing if the message that writing and releasing malicious code is wrong and will be punished is hammered home by the due course of the law."