By Jo Best, 14 February 2005 11:50
NEWS A teenage virus writer has been sentenced to three years' probation for committing a denial-of-service attack on Microsoft's homepage.
The teenager released the RPCSDBOT Trojan in August 2003, creating a botnet which waged a DDoS attack on Microsoft, bringing down Redmond's website for around four hours.
Due to the virus writer's juvenile status, no information about him or her can be given, although the DDoS attacker was 14 at the time the RPCSDBOT Trojan was released, according to reports.
The youth was charged with committing an act of juvenile delinquency and, in addition to three years' probation, will have to complete 300 hours of community service. The judge also recommended that he or she has mental health counselling.
The RPCSDBOT worm that the youngster created exploited the same software hole in the Windows OS as the Blaster worm, which saw another teenage virus writer in the dock.
Jeffrey Lee Parson, now 19, was sentenced earlier this year for created the Blaster.B variant. He received an 18-month prison sentence.
Comments
There are 7 comments. Join the discussion
1. Simon mallett
Mental health counselling! Needs a good slap and DOPM (denial of pocket money).
2. FredBear
What's a 14-year-old doing using an operating system designed for mentally retarded 5-year olds?
3. Darth Rumsfeld
Can we start wearing "Free the 14 tear old who shut down M$" T-shirts?
4. kl green
The counseling should consist of a good asswhoopin'.
5. The Drunk
Actually, I say good for the 14 yr old. Microsoft should pay him money for finding another way of screwing up their lowsy software.
6. DoS Attac
It just goes to show how right Mr. Ballmer is - Microsoft is a really secure system and the microsoft.com website is hosted on really secure servers. Mr. Ballmer - we suppose the Denial of Service attacks were launched by "communists" using "insecure" linux systems. Tut tut - 14 year old crashes Microsoft.
7. Anonymous Coward
Re: It just goes to show how right Mr. Ballmer is...:
While I am suprised that Microsoft doesn't get hacked much (maybe they run Unix...), this was not an attack that's specific to any OS. DDOS is just a way to overload the system resources, and while Linux would last a little bit longer, any system has to run out of bandwidth and memory eventually.
The method used to make computers join the attack was very Windows-specific (a worm), but they could have successfully attacked probably any site by overloading their internet connection and hardware.