An 18-year-old German student has confessed to authorities to creating the "Sasser" computer worm that affected millions of computers worldwide.  

A spokesman for the Lower Saxony State Criminal Office in Hanover said on Saturday the student was arrested in the northern town of Rotenburg on Friday.

The Sasser worm struck last Saturday and attacked computers through a flaw in recent versions of Microsoft's Windows operating systems, causing computers to repeatedly shut down and reboot.

If convicted the student could be sentenced to five years in prison.

Fortunately, Sasser was one of the less harmful varieties of its species. The worm did not cause any direct damage other than the fact that it made computers crash and stall networks.

"The damage is difficult to estimate because nothing has actually been destroyed in the sense of the word," said Michael Dickopf of the Federal Office for Information Technology Security (BSI).

"Only companies' productivity was affected, their networks were slowed down."

Despite all the media attention it got, Sasser caused far less damage than its predecessors.

"The situation was nowhere near as dramatic as last August, when 'Blaster' was going around," said Rainer Link of the virus protection software maker Trend Micro.

Even Blaster, a so-called super worm, was more like a baby worm compared to the "Love Bug."

Instead spreading itself as an e-mail attachment, Sasser takes advantage of a weakness in the Windows operating system to automatically install itself on unsuspecting computers.

"In the worst-case scenarios, people go online and are infected within 30 seconds," Link said.

(Xinhua News Agency May 9, 2004)