Farid Essebar, an 18-year-old Moroccan, is appearing in Court charged with distributing August's Zotob worm. Essebar has denied the charges, despite being at the centre of an investigation co-ordinated between the FBI and Moroccan and Turkish police to nail the responsible parties. The Zotob worm exploited a Plug and Play vulnerability in some Microsoft software, and was responsible for disruptions in many systems, including those belonging to ABC World News Tonight, CNN and the New York Post.
"The authorities will need to unravel a tangled web to find out precisely who was responsible in the complicated case of the Zotob worm," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus company Sophos. "We believe it is likely that a number of people are likely to have been involved, some with the writing and distributing of the worm, and some with the criminal use of data it attempted to steal from innocent users."
Essebar's lawyer, Mohamed Fertat, was optimistic about an acquittal, claiming that it was likely that the investigation would not find Essebar guilty. The FBI is pursuing a great number of other suspects in connection with this.