Well, frankly, I'm a little astonished to see the German court system taking a reasonable approach to this situation. If this were an American trial, they'd probably still be tallying up the zeros for what they'd be trying to fine him in restitution.

It does appear that the judge took into consideration a number of factors, Sven's (the author of Sasser) age, the fact that he'd been working on code to try and actively hunt down and eliminate other viruses (which old heads know to be a mook's game--but it's nice every now and then to see someone naieve enough to try anyway), and most particularly, that he *isn't* one of the evil criminal mastermind types who would have otherwise probably tried to take advantage of such a bug, if a relatively harmless kid hadn't inadvertently drawn the attention of the entire planet to it first.

I'm not saying it's a good thing that Sasser wreaked havoc world-wide, but it's a far better thing that these incidents happen in a relatively harmless manner, rather than having a worm with a truly malicious payload go 'round the planet scrapping people's spreadsheets, budgets, and other works in progress. I mean, seriously--someone could probably strap a bit of code into a healthy worm that would encrypt all the doc files on someone's system and leave a message with a URL for where to enter a credit card to pay $5 for the key, and make a sizeable sum of money (and billions of enemies). Smart criminals *are* out there. Let's just be glad the worst incidents we're seeing are coming from people who are just a little airheaded. :)

Sasser author gets 21-month *suspended* sentence