Officers from the Israeli Police's Computer Crime Squad arrested four Nahariya teenagers on Saturday, and confiscated their home computers. The four reportedly confessed to writing and spreading the deadly Goner computer worm, which wrecked havoc on thousands of computer users around the world during the last month.

The parents of the four teenagers, high school students aged 15 and 16, were in complete shock. "At six in the morning the police arrived with a search warrant and asked us to wake up our son," one parent said. "In the meantime, they searched the house and took the computer. We didn't understand what was happening."

According to Yediot Aharonot, the four developed the

"Hi. How are you?" - subject line of an infected e-mail message

computer worm as part of a "war" they were conducting with a rival group of Israeli students. One of the youths reportedly confessed to writing the worm and the other youths confessed to spreading it, said Meir Zohar, head of the computer crime squad.

The youths' lawyers, Moshe Gilad, Daoud Mazen and Yitzhak Eliezer, asked the Akko District Judge to release their young clients to house arrest. "We are talking about minors with no previous criminal record, and being under arrest is quite a trauma for them," the lawyers said. Justice Jamal Nasser ordered that the youths be held in custody due to the severity of their crime, and the international damage it had caused.

The Goner worm, which first spread early this month to computers in Europe, especially in France and Germany, appears as an apparently harmless e-mail, with a subject line of "Hi'' and a message asking the recipient to open an attached screen saver. If the attachment is opened, the worm spreads itself to all contact addresses in Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail programs and through the instant messaging program ICQ and Internet chat tools. In addition, the worm destroys anti-virus and firewall applications, exposing recipients to further attacks.

The Nahariya youths had reportedly copied the code for the notorious Melissa computer worm and had added some of their own improvements to it. Anti-virus company McAfee had labeled Goner's spread on the Internet as a "high-risk virus outbreak." Reuters reported that at least 56,000 computers worldwide had been affected by the worm as of last Thursday.

Under Israeli law, the suspects could face between three and five years in jail if convicted, Zohar said.

The computer squad was set up four years ago, and helped trap Ehud Tannenbaum, who under his Internet nomme de guerre, The Analyzer, succeeding in hacking into computers of the United States Department of Defense and the American Space Agency. The squad also helped police track down and capture Amani Mona, the Palestinian woman who used the Internet this past summer to coax Israeli teenager Ofir Rahum to meet her in Ramallah, where he was subsequently killed by terrorists.

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