Lawyers disagree over punishment in Sasser trial

Sven Jaschan is expected to be sentenced tomorrow

July 7, 2005 (IDG News Service)

In their closing remarks today, the state prosecutor and the defense attorney in the trial of the Sasser computer worm author disagreed on what should happen to the 19-year-old German teenager if he commits a crime while on probation.
Sven Jaschan has been on trial since Tuesday in the district court in Verden, Germany, where he faces charges of computer sabotage, data manipulation and disruption of public systems (see German teenager admits in court to creating Sasser worm).
The state prosecutor is demanding a probation period of three years during which the accused hacker would be required to complete 200 hours of public service, the court said in a statement. If Jaschan commits another crime during the probation, he would be subject to two years of confinement in a juvenile detention center.
Jaschan's defense lawyer, however, wants a confinement period of only one year if his client commits a crime while on probation. He argued that the teenager had no criminal intentions when he created the computer worm.
The court intends to reach a verdict tomorrow and then announce a sentence that could differ from what the prosecution and defense are seeking, according to Verden District Court spokeswoman Katharina Krutzfeldt. Jaschan could also face civil lawsuits brought against him by companies whose IT systems were infected by the computer worm.
At the start of his trial, Jaschan again confessed to creating last year's Sasser computer worm, which crashed hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. He was arrested in May 2004 at the family's home in Waffensen, Germany, after Microsoft Corp. received a tip from an informant seeking a reward from the software company.
After the arrest, Jaschan acknowledged that he created the worm.
Sasser, a self-executing piece of software code, exploited a hole in a component of Windows called the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service, or LSASS. The worm scanned the Internet searching for vulnerable computers.