German police arrest Sasser worm suspect

German police have arrested an 18-year-old man suspected of creating the Sasser computer worm, believed to be one of the Internet's costliest outbreaks of sabotage.

Since appearing a week ago, Sasser has wreaked havoc on personal computers running on the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows 2000, NT and XP operating systems, but is expected to slow down as computer users download antivirus patches.

Separately, police in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said they had arrested a 21-year-old man who confessed to programing the Internet worm Agobot, which was later renamed as Phatbot.

From the outset, Sasser baffled security experts. Unlike the most recent digital outbreaks, Sasser was programed simply to spread and knock out computer networks, not take over machines and possibly steal information stored on them.

If the Sasser author is part of the Netsky group, which calls itself the "Skynet antivirus group," this could be the most important arrest yet in cracking virus-writing crime.