Japanese judge jails serial malware author
Japanese authorities have jailed a serial malware writer for two-and-a-half years over his latest creation. Masato Nakatsuji, 28, was found responsible for writing a strain of malware that spread across the locally popular Winny peer-to-peer file-sharing network last summer, replacing infected files on victims' computers with …
More blackhats deserve to be behind bars. Good for this judge for handling this case properly.
Now if only US law were this strict on US citizens.
I think 2 to 5 years behind bars is a fitting punishment for a repeat offender of a non-violent like this, especially since he was serving a suspended sentence when he committed the second crime.
Seems to me he created a program which infiltrated the computers of people who were involved in a p2p file sharing ring. The software then deleted all music and video files on the PC while displaying a cute cartoon character on the screen. His punishment seems a bit harsh when you consider that 99.99% of such file-sharing rings exist only to illegally distribute copyrighted files, mostly films and music.
Writing and distributing malware. It's illegal.
And funnily enough, saying something along the lines of 'they deserved it anyway', doesn't generally work out too well as a defence.
And it should be fine to administer beatings to the users, too? After all, if they're engaging in illicit activity, it's ok to do something nasty and illegal to them, right?
(actually, I would like to beat some of the users here, for abusing bandwidth for such rubbish films)
I have a feeling that most Japanese are probably using the P2P in a perfectly legal way, just for exchanging personal data. It's funny how for most of us P2P is synonymous with illegal file sharing :)
Does this ika-tako virus run on the less secure Apple or Linux 'computers' ?
Seems to me that as the previous and almost identical offense carried two years that this one should be at least another two plus the suspension of the first being automatically lifted for violating probation.
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