The damage the worm has caused to date by flooding and temporarily crippling mail servers and deleting anti-virus files has been estimated at around $5 million.
The head of Israel’s police computer crime squad, Meir Zohar, told reporters: “They are not bandits; they are regular kids. They are not computer geniuses, although one of them could write a program. I don’t think they fully understood what they were doing.”
The country’s law provides a maximum sentence of two and a half years imprisonment for the crime of writing and spreading computer viruses when committed by juveniles, half of the sentence which would be applicable to adults.
The youths appear to have been caught by security experts who traced the IP address of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel which they set up to control the worm. The experts monitored the channel and passed the information to the FBI which then contacted Israel’s authorities.