The majority of people polled by a security firm said that the teenager sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for spawning a variant of the MSBlast worm deserved tougher punishment.

In the online poll released Wednesday by U.K.-based security vendor Sophos, 53 percent of those surveyed said that Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, received a too-lenient sentence. Only 14 percent said the jail time was too much.

Parson, who admitted to re-coding the original MSBlast worm in August of 2003 and sending it back onto the Web, pleaded guilty in 2004 and was sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security federal prison late last month. According to government lawyers, Parson's MSBlast.b worm infected nearly 50,000 PCs and caused $1.2 million in damages.

The building anger of computer users toward hackers is the most likely reason so many want to see a relatively minor player do hard time, said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos. "You have no idea how vociferous people are about their hatred of virus writers," said Cluley. "There's really no mercy. They really want the virus writers to pay hard for what they've done."

While Parson certainly knew what he was doing and should pay for his crime, Cluley said, he questions whether the punishment fit the crime.

"In my mind, he's just not of the greatest Internet villains of all time," said Cluley, who added that he was glad to see Parson not get a stiffer sentence. "I don't see chucking him away in jail helping him very much. From all indications, he's had a sad little life."

The judge in the case agreed. When U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman sentenced Parson last week, she laid down some unusual requirements of the 100 hours of community service he must perform, and banned him from computers after he's released from jail.

Pechman required Parson to do his community service through face-to-face contact with others, and according to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney, told him, "No video games, no chat rooms. I don't want you to have anonymous friends, I want you to have real world friends."

Cluley also pointed out what many observers of the Parson trial have omitted: that the perpetrator(s) of MSBlast itself remain at large, even though rewards totaling $500,000 have been posted and that worm infected millions of machines. Microsoft's decision to focus Windows XP's next major update on security was largely triggered by the fallout from MSBlast; the worm's impact was the big reason why Service Pack 2 (SP2) was delayed until the fall of 2004.

"I have very little sympathy for Parson, who was largely caught by his own stupidity, but people are eager to blame someone for viruses. The trouble is, there are much bigger criminals out there," said Cluley.

The increasingly tight connections between virus writers and spammers, said Cluley, is where law enforcement should focus its efforts. "The criminals who set up these spam factories of compromised computers, they're the guys we should be after."

Still, the venom directed toward Parson by Sophos' poll takers was deadly at times.

"Dip [the virus writers] in a vat of weak acid for days until their skin melts. Or remove their fingers so they can no longer type virus code," one wrote.

"Hundreds of thousands of man-hours wasted, enormous cost and disruption to business globally just to give some lonely saddo geek the satisfaction of sitting back and grinning that he has caused all this mayhem -- you bet he should go to jail," said another.

"Even we lose sight of how much people hate virus writers," said Cluley, "and we're right in the front lines of the fight."