Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Botnet 'Test' That Aimed DDoS at ISP Leads to Guilty Plea

Robert McMillan writes on ComputerWorld:

The second man charged in 2006 computer attacks on The Planet and T35 Hosting has agreed to plead guilty.

According to court filings, Thomas James Frederick Smith is set to plead guilty before a federal judge in Dallas on June 10. He and David Anthony Edwards are facing five years in prison and fines of up to US$250,000 on charges that they assembled a 22,000-node botnet and then trained it on two ISPs to show a prospective buyer what it could do.

Edwards pleaded guilty to the charges before U.S. District Judge Jane J. Boyle on April 29. He is set to be sentenced August 19. Before he decided to plead guilty, Smith's case had been set to go to trial next week.

Federal prosecutors say that Smith and Edwards -- known by their hacker handles Zook and Davus -- created a botnet they called Nettick, which they then tried to sell to cybercriminals, asking US$0.15 per infected computer.

More here.

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