The FBI arrested a Minnesota teen for creating a variant of the Blaster internet worm:

Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, of Hopkins, Minnesota, a middle- class suburb west of Minneapolis, was arrested on one count of intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a computer, according to a St. Paul district court clerk.

....Parson, who was described in the complaint as being 6-feet-4-inches tall and weighing 320 pounds, is scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge in St. Paul later on Friday.

He admitted to creating a variant of the worm, according to a complaint filed in the Western District of Washington state, where Microsoft is based in the Seattle suburb of Redmond.

....Parson admitted modifying Blaster and creating a variant known by different names, including "W32/Lovesan.worm.b" and admitted that he renamed the original code dubbed "MSBlast.exe" "teekids.exe," after his online alias, the complaint said.

He also said he included a hidden Trojan horse program called "Lithium" in the worm, leaving a back door so he could reconnect remotely to the infected computers later.

FBI agents interviewed Parson when they searched his home on Aug. 19 and seized seven computers.

Blaster and its variants are self-replicating Internet worms that bore into Windows machines through a security hole, harnessing them to launch concerted data attacks via the Internet on a Microsoft technical service Web site. Microsoft has been able to thwart the attacks by disconnecting the Web address from the Internet. [Reuters]