A Dutch appeals court last month upheld the conviction of the 22-year-old man who created and unleashed the Anna Kournikova e-mail worm last year. Jan de Wit of Sneek, Netherlands, was sentenced to 150 hours of community service by the appeals court in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, for creating and sending out the e-mail worm. The verdict is identical to the one handed down by the Leeuwarden district court in September last year. De Wit used a worm-making toolkit to create a worm that, under the guise of an e-mail image of Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova, spread like wildfire for two days in February 2001.
Hammer time
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) announced last month that its Hammer technology-based processors will include RSA Security Inc.’s encryption software, and will be available in Canada beginning in March or April of 2003. The agreement will see Bedford, Mass.-based RSA’s encryption software added to AMD’s existing Athlon processors for mobile desktop and workstations. Future 32-bit and 64-bit modes of AMD’s Opteron processors will also contain the security solution. AMD made the move to secure its processors to achieve better performance and allow software developers to protect their critical applications, according to an RSA press release.
Under attack
The Internet withstood a major attack on its core infrastructure on Oct. 21 when all 13 of its root servers were struck, according to a spokesman for VeriSign Inc., which operates two of the servers. The distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack started at about 5 p.m. EDT and lasted about an hour, said VeriSign spokesman Brian O’Shaughnessy. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) National Infrastructure Protection Center “is aware of the matter” and is “addressing” it, said an FBI spokesperson. Four or five of the Internet’s 13 root servers kept working during the attack, so traffic kept moving, according to the Washington Post.