It looks like the guy behind the “Blaster” worm was a teenager from Minnesota.
One of the tenets of nanotechnology is that the distinction between hardware and software is going to increasingly blur in the years and decades ahead. This is an example where that’s happening. Had this guy demolished a skyscraper (empty of people), he’d be considered a terrorist, but I doubt that he’d have done that, or even considered it, because that’s such an obvious huge destruction of property.
But what he did instead destroyed an equivalent amount of wealth in lost data and lost productivity. We need to come up with a way to make it very clear to people, particularly young people, that there’s no substantive difference between those two crimes.