Japanese man in court over spread of Trojan

By Isabelle Chaize

Masato Nakatsuji, a 24 year old Japanese man, has become the first virus writer to be arrested in Japan. He has admitted in Kyoto District Court that he used copyrighted footage to spread a Trojan which he had created.

The code, thought to be the Pirlames Trojan, was created with the aim of deleting media files from infected computers. It was spread during 2007 via the file-sharing system Winny, whose author Isamu Kaneko was fined in December 2006 for assisting in copyright violation.

Despite creating the Trojan however, Nakatsuji does not face charges of creating malware but instead is accused of copyright infringement, because he used copyrighted animated pictures to spread his Trojan by placing links to the images on internet forums, and defamation, since he supposedly embedded a photograph of an acquaintance into the code.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said that the failure to charge Nakatsuji with creating malware gave off the wrong message to virus writers. ‘If he is found guilty, the general public are unlikely to worry that it was his ill-advised choice of graphics which got him into legal trouble rather than virus writing,’ he said.

‘However, a clear message needs to be sent to the computer underground that they will not be shown a blind eye if they spread malicious code and damage innocent people’s computers and data.’

Despite the admission, made on the first day of the trial, Nakatsuji’s defense have argued that, as the code was not seriously malignant, it would not be in the interests of justice to punish him for spreading the malware when there are no actual laws specifically forbidding such actions.