A CANADIAN HAS been charged with distributing the Randex worm, and a Taiwanese man arrested for penning the Peep.exe Trojan horse program.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police certainly got their man, or in this case a 16 year-old boy from Mississauga, Ontario. The kid, who is too young to be named, will appear in a youth court on June 3 to face charges of computer fraud and mischief to data for helping distribute the Randex computer worm.

The Randex worm spreads by breaking into computers using an unpatched version of the patchwork quilt that is Microsoft's Windows. The worm first appeared last June.

He was collared following an RCMP investigation that linked him to a network of Randex-infected computers acting as robots, or "bots". According to a statement released by Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau, a bloke only identified by his surname Wang has been banged up for writing Peep.exe, a Trojan that was used by Chinese hackers to attack computers in Taiwan earlier this year.

The 30 year-old computer engineer allegedly penned the Iliad known as Peep, or PeepBrowser.exe.

Tai authorities claim the Trojan was distributed over the Internet by Wang to hackers in China, who used the program disguised as a small game to attack thousands of computers in Taiwan.

The first version of the Trojan recorded keystrokes made on a computer and transmits keystrokes for passwords and other information, such as bank account numbers, to the distributor of the program. A second version enables hackers to take control of the computer remotely, including running applications, downloading files, and altering the system registry files.



Source:

The INQ!