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OREGON---A 21-year-old Beaverton, Ore. Man has pleaded guilty to launching a computer attack against the Internet auction site eBay in July and August, 2003 with an army of infected computers he had amassed by using a computer worm program.
Anthony Scott Clark, pleaded guilty in federal court in San Jose, CA., to a criminal information charging him with intentionally causing damage to a protected computer. The maximum statutory penalty for this offense is 10 years imprisonment, a $250,000 fine or twice the gross gain or loss, and three years supervised release. However, any sentence following conviction would be imposed by the Court after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence.
U.S. District Judge James Ware has scheduled a status hearing regarding sentencing for April 3.
In pleading guilty, Mr. Clark admitted that from July through August 2003, he participated with several others in distributed denial of service attacks on the Internet against eBay, Inc. and other entities. A DDOS attack is one in which many compromised computers (or "bots) attack a single target, thereby causing a denial of service for legitimate users of the targeted system.
Clark and his accomplices accumulated approximately 20,000 "bots" by using a worm program that took advantage of a computer vulnerability in the Windows Operating System - the "Remote Procedure Call for Distributed Component Object Model," or RPC-DCOM vulnerability. The "bots" were then directed to a password-protected Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server, where they connected, logged in, and waited for instructions. When instructed to do so by Clark and his accomplices, the "bots" launched DDOS attacks at computers or computer networks connected to the Internet. Mr. Clark personally commanded the "bots" to launch DDOS attacks on the nameserver for eBay.com. As a result of these commands, Mr. Clark intentionally impaired the infected computers and eBay.com.
The prosecution is the result of an investigation by agents of the U.S. Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force, which was overseen by the U.S. Attorney's Office's Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) Unit. 12-30-05
© 2005 North
Country Gazette
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