Law enforcement officials in Morocco and Turkey arrested two men suspected of unleashing the "Zotob" computer worm that disabled US customs and immigration computers last week, the FBI and Microsoft said on Friday.
The two suspects are Farid Essebar, 18, a Moroccan national arrested in Morocco, and Atilla Ekici, 21, who was arrested in Turkey.
When the Zotob worm struck on Aug.19, thousands of international visitors were left waiting at US airports for up to five hours to enter the country.
The men also are suspected of releasing the "Mytob" computer worm. Both worms were designed to take advantage of flaws in Microsoft's widely used Windows operating system, prompting the company's Internet crime investigations unit to collaborate with the FBI to locate the source.
In a conference call with reporters, Louis Reigel III, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, said Ekici, who went by the online alias Coder, paid Essebar, operating under the name Diabl0, to create Zotob and another worm, called Mytob. But Reigel would not comment on whether they were part of a broader operation.
"They certainly knew each other via the Internet," Reigel said, but it was not clear whether they had met in person.
He declined to specify on Friday whether any data was compromised in the Zotob episode.
Morocco's state news agency reported that Essebar acted in league with groups involved in bank-card forgery.
Mytob is an e-mail worm that emerged in late February and that has been used by hackers to steal personal information from infected computers and to convert infected computers into spam relays.
The emergence of Zotob just after Microsoft released the patch highlighted the fact that that virus writers monitor patch releases.
Both men would be prosecuted in the countries in which they were arrested, Reigel said.
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