Fergie's Tech Blog

Hacker Behind P2P Botnet Gets No Jail Time

Dan Goodin writes on The Register:

A hacker who confessed he created one of the world's first botnets to use peer-to-peer technology won't spend any time in prison because of the assistance he's provided to prosecutors.

Jason Michael Milmont, 20, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was sentenced on Tuesday to five years of supervised probation and a year of home confinement. US District Judge William Downes of Casper, Wyoming also ordered him to pay almost $37,000 in restitution. The relatively lenient sentence - he faced a maximum five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine - came in exchange for help he's provided prosecutors since pleading guilty.

"This young man has quite a bit of talent and we asked that he turn that talent toward good," said John Powell, a spokesman for the US Attorney's office in Cheyenne. "He's helped us somewhat toward that."

Last year, Milmont admitted to creating the so-called Nugache Worm, which spawned one of the first botnets to use a decentralized system to send instructions to drones, according to security researcher Dave Dittrich. The peer-to-peer mechanism was considered a break-through because it eliminated the need for a single master control channel. That made it much harder to shut down the botnet.

posted by Fergie @ 4/29/2009 04:22:00 PM