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Local authorities arrested 18-year-old Farid Essebar in Morocco and 21-year-old Atilla Ekici in Turkey on Thursday, according to the FBI. The U.S. law enforcement agency believes that Essebar coded the Zotob worm and the Mytob bot software, on which the worm was based, for Ekici, who allegedly paid the programmer.

"The Moroccan was responsible for writing the code," Louis M. Reigel III, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, said during a Friday afternoon press conference. "He had a financial relationship with the Turkish man."



The Zotob worm started spreading on August 14, but mainly affected systems running Windows 2000, Microsoft's five-year old operating system. Initially, the worm seemed to compromise few systems. However, two days later, computers at CNN and the New York Times became infected by one or more variants of the worm, and the public profile of the programs increased a notch.

The Zotob worm, and later variants, are all based on versatile attack programs, known as bot software, which had added the ability to spread via a flaw in Microsoft's Windows Plug-and-Play functionality. Several bot programs had incorporated the code to exploit the flaw as early as August 12, and starting with the Zotob worm, began adding the ability to automatically find and infect systems by the weekend. At least 12 versions of bot software used the exploit to spread, according to antivirus companies.