By Dan Ilett, 24 January 2006 14:40
NEWS
A US man has pleaded guilty to leasing out networks of compromised computers to criminals so they can carry out denial of service and spam attacks.
Twenty-year old Californian Jeanson James Ancheta faces up to six years in prison for felony charges that include making more than $61,000 from renting the illegal networks and infecting US military computers.
The Associated Press reports that Ancheta, who will be sentenced before a US District Court on 1 May, stands to lose his BMW and more than $58,000.
Reports suggest this could be the first case to take aim at people who profit from 'botnets' - networks of virus-infected computers used by hackers to launch attacks.
Last year Ancheta was charged with 17 counts of conspiracy fraud and a 14-month hacking spree.
James Rendell, senior technology specialist at Internet Security Systems, said: "Those who actively target businesses and computer users with malicious activities will not get away with it.
"Not only is it reassuring to see the US government prosecuting this 20-year-old where he actively targeted thousands of computer systems and infected them with malicious software for his own financial gain but it also shows the seriousness of this crime spree."
Comments
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1. Roger Huffadine
Give the guy a job - he infected US military computers. 30 years ago I would read about trojans and viruses in Scientific American magazine. The USA were supposed to be 'experts' in this field of electronic warfare - and the described attacks were orders of magnitude more sophisticated than these. What happened, did the military sack all of its experts or were the articles just bullshit?
2. James Button
Aw Come-on, Intrusion into USA government systems doesn't justify a job.
I still remember the case where a government system hadn't had the main admin password changed from 'System/Test', the default install value as documented in most of the associated manufacturers 'System Installation and Management' documentation.
And I wonder how many government, and business, PC's also allow access to userid 'Administrator', providing you don't try to enter a password