Chinese Police Set To Release Hacker’s Worm Killer Program

A hacker who was detained just a few days back will now be allowed to release a patch for fixing the worm he had aided in writing, reported the state media in China on Wednesday, 14 February 2007.

Li Jun, amongst the 6 people apprehended recently by the provincial police for being involved in creating and selling the bug dubbed as Fujacks and Panda Burning Joss-Stick, has designed a seek & destroy program that'll eliminate the worm, Xinhua News Agency said.

Computer users may download this free of cost worm killer program from the World Wide Web after the police conducts further tests, according to Ye Tieguan - the vice director with Xiantao police bureau. Primary examinations have found the program composed by Li to be effective, said Tieguan.

Li confessed before the police that he had written that program for killing the 'panda burning joss-stick' worm after knowing that numerous machines were infected. However he didn't release it, since he was afraid that this would disclose his whereabouts to the police.

Xinhua further reported that Li admitted that he had written the program just for the sake of fun & selling it to lots of people for around US$ 13000. The worm that infects files on the compromised PC and flashes the image of panda with 3 joss sticks is spreading through Internet. Countless PCs have been infected by the worm since December last year.

The worm may also steal popular chatting sites and online game players' account names & passwords. It was listed as the worst worm last year by a major anti-virus firm in China.

Meanwhile, Sophos' experts have suggested that computer users should pay attention to the way they cure virus infections. This came after the Chinese police announced to release a clean up program designed by the Fujacks worm author.

"Virus writers and hackers have shown their irresponsibility and untrustworthiness. Certainly, I won't prefer running their code on my machine", divulged Graham Cluley - Sophos' senior technology consultant in a press release of the company.

"Furthermore, the worm left some of the infected documents on the compromised machine incapable of running. This suggests that the author perhaps didn't take quality assurance measures while constructing his malware. We recommend the computer users to clean their machines with some professional tool designed by security experts", he added.

Related article: Chinese Hackers Threatening Korean Game Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 2/23/2007