Man admits in court to writing anime Trojan horse that attacked P2P users

Experts at SophosLabs, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have reminded businesses of the importance of protecting their networks from virus attack, as a Japanese man admits in court to writing a data-destroying Trojan horse.

24-year-old Masato Nakatsuji, who was revealed to be the first ever virus writer to be arrested in Japan when he was apprehended in January, admited in Kyoto District Court that he created a Trojan horse and used copyrighted animation footage to spread it via the net. Nakatsuji has admitted to having written the malware which displayed images of popular anime characters while wiping music and movie files from users' computers. The malicious code, believed to be the Pirlames Trojan, was spread via the controversial Winny file-sharing system in Japan last year.