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Young hacker pleads guilty |
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Wednesday, 25 January 2006 |
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We hear about "hackers" who take control of zillions of home PCs and use them to send out spam, but theyre pretty shadowy figures.
This weeks news puts a "face" on one of these guys: 20-year-old "Jeanson James Ancheta, of Downey, Calif., pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles federal court to four felony charges" of hijacking hundreds of thousands of computers," the Associated Press reports. He faces six years in prison and a fine and will have to turn over his profits and a 1993 BMW he apparently bought with is earnings. Those earnings came from infecting peoples computers with a virus that opened a "back door" allowing him to take control of them, then renting out the use of them to spammers. Hijacked computers are called "zombies" that are grouped together into "botnets" (zombie or bot networks) to do certain tasks like spamming or launching denial-of-service attacks that shut down large retail sites for the purpose of extortion or "protection" money. Working with an even younger malicious hacker in Florida (IDd by his screenname "SoBe" because hes a minor), Ancheta advertised their botnets on Internet relay chat (IRC) channels. They reportedly made $58,000 during their "14-month hacking spree." Prosecutors say Ancheta wrote in IRC chat that he was hoping this could help him delay getting a job. |