UK: Teen worm writer sentenced

A British teenager who is believed to be part of an international Internet gang has been given a six-month suspended sentence for his role in writing and distributing a worm. ZDNET UK cites one PC security experts as suggesting the 16-year-old "escaped lightly because of his age." The Randex worm that he helped write turned computers it infected into "zombies" that its writers - or spammers to whom they sold a whole network of zombie computers - could control for distribution of spam or for denial-of service attacks on large Web sites. The boy was sentenced at South Cheshire juvenile court, ZDNET UK reports. For more on the zombie phenomenon, see "What if our PC's a zombie?!"