Two British men were charged on Monday with conspiring to take over computers using malicious code.

Jordan Bradley, 20, of Bates Avenue, Darlington, and Andrew Harvey, 22, of Scardale Way, Durham, are believed by the National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) to be members of an underground cracking group called the "Thr34t-Krew" who launched the TK Worm (AKA Troj/TKBot-A) sometime before February this year.

The Trojan horse code attempts to exploit a vulnerability involving Microsoft's IIS Web Server software to break into vulnerable sites and give up their control to crackers. Microsoft released a patch for this vulnerability in October 2000 (see advisory here).

The TK worm allowed infected computers to be controlled over an IRC channel. A variety of actions, from scanning other computers for vulnerabilities to starting DDoS attacks on other computers and Web sites, could be initiated from infected hosts.

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