Dutch police have arrested a man suspected of writing and then unleashing the so-called Anna Kournikova virus.
Known only by his hacker handle of OnTheFly, the 20-year-old man posted a confession on Tuesday, saying he had written the virus as a means of proving that no one had learned a lesson from the outbreak of the ILOVEYOU virus last year.
The virus, which acts in a manner identical to the infamous ILOVEYOU bug, arrives in a user's inbox in an email with an attachment named annakournikova.jpg.vbs. The subject line and attachment name are static at this point but may change as the virus spreads.
The virus poses as a photo of Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova; it spread aggressively this week, as major security companies rushed to update their anti-virus software to detect it.
An admittedly inexperienced hacker, using the alias OnTheFly, posted a letter on the Internet Tuesday claiming responsibility for writing the virus.
OnTheFly said in the letter that he recently saw a research note from International Data analysts that said Internet users had failed to learn from their experiences with the "Love bug." The note apparently inspired the hacker to see if IDC's theory was true.
The hacker goes on to say that he built the worm using the VBSWG virus-writing kit because he didn't know any programming languages.
Trend Micro is listing the bug as a high risk and warning people not to open any attachments.
