On Friday evening [BST] US authorities charged Jeffery Parsons with creating a variant of the Blaster worm know as “Blaster B”. Such a trail of clues pointed to Parsons that those investigating the case must have initially expected that they were dealing with a case of identity theft, but from the reports it seems that Parsons had modified and re-released the worm “because he could” giving no thought to the potential consequences for himself.

Files were created in the modified worm with the same name as Parsons’ domain name and IRC handle, and infected machines registered themselves with a host in Parsons’ domain, which is registered in his own name and to his home address. The front page of Parsons’ web site is presently the default Apache installation page, but the Google cache reveals an interest in software for covert mass remote control, including IRCbots, Worms and Viruses.