The Moroccan authorities have sentenced the two men who were behind the Zotob worm to prison. Farid Essebar, the 19-year-old programmer of the malware, has been sentenced to two years in prison and his accomplice, Achraf Bahloul, has been sentenced to one year. The third accomplice, 22-year-old Atilla Ekici, is still on trial in Turkey for his role in financing the crime. Essebar and Ekici had already been caught by the FBI just two weeks after the outbreak. The worm, responsible for infecting 250,000 PCs last year, had attacked computers belonging to CNN, The Financial Times, ABC and The New York Times, among others. The hacked computers were used for DDoS attacks or searched for personal information such as credit card numbers. “The Zotob gang took over computers from innocent companies with the intention of making money,” said a Sophos counselor. ‘By blasting their way into PCs via a Microsoft vulnerability they ripped control of the computer away from its owner and into the hands of hackers’, is how he described the drama.