Viruses created in China are not unknown but the police, for the first time, have arrested eight people and got them on holding charges for producing and distributing a computer virus.

Li Jun, a 25-year-old hacker from Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei Province, is accused of creating the virus ‘Xiongmao Shaoxiang’ (Panda Burns Joss-sticks which is a fairly catchy title).

He told police he programmed the virus on October 16, 2006 and made more than RMB100,000 ($13,000) selling it via the Internet to over 120 people.

Li also created three other viruses and all of them have caused havoc within China’s Internet communities.

Apart from Li, five of the other seven suspects (average age of 23) are accused of mutating and spreading various computer viruses including ‘Xiongmao Shaoxiang‘.

According to the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center in China, Xiongmao Shaoxiang, officially named Worm_Viking, is the worst virus of the past four months.

An infected computer will display a blue screen, go through frequent automatic restarts and lose hardware data. All its files are shown as a panda icon. The virus also features a Trojan horse program which can steal the passwords of computer users.