Two men suspected of creating and distributing the Zotob and Mytob worms have been arrested in Morocco and Turkey. Farid Essedar, 18, of Morocco and Atilla Ekici, 21, of Morocco, go by the aliases of Diablo and Coder respectively, and were apprehended when Microsoft's Internet Crime Investigations Team was able to glean information about the source of the attacks by dissecting the worms.
"We believe there was financial gain on the part of the Moroccan with regards to writing of the code," said Louis Reigel, FBI Cyber Division assistant director.
Zotob, released earlier this month, targeted vulnerable Windows 2000 computers. A variant of it shut down systems at several major media outlets worldwide, including CNN, ABC and the New York Times.