Hacker & eBay attacker pleads guilty
It is not often that hackers get caught, but when they do, they make as much news as their viruses, found out Anthony Scott Clark, a 21 year old from Beaverton, Ore, who has pleaded guilty before federal court for launching a virus attack on eBay, an internet auction site, in July and August.
His soldiers were an army of computers infected by a computer virus program which he used to raid the Internet auction site in July and August of 2003.
Clark, also known by his alias name, “Volkam”, was found, and pleaded guilty to knowingly damaging a protected computer. He now faces a maximum statutory penalty of a find or $250,000, 10 years imprisonment, said the US attorney's office for the district of California. The sentence following conviction will only be imposed by the court, after considering the US Sentencing Guidelines and Federal Statutes governing imposition of sentences.
Clark, along with his accomplices, collected over 20,000 “bots” using a worm program which took advantage of a vulnerability in the computers running the Windows Operating System, the “Remote Procedure Call for Distributed Component Object Model,” or RPC-DCOM vulnerability.
The collected 'Bots' were passed on to a Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server protected by passwords, where they collected, logged and stayed put for further instructions. After getting instructions from Clark and his accomplices, these “bots” launched the DDOS attack on computers or their corresponding network connected to the Internet.
Clark is accused of personally commanding these “bots” to launch the DDOS attacks on the nameserver of eBay.com. Because of these commands, the functionality of the computers at eBay.com was effected.
The prosecution resulted after investigation from agent of US Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force. This force is overseen by US Attorney's Office's Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) Unit. The Assistant US attorney who was prosecuting the case, Christopher P. Sonderby is the Chief of the CHIP Unit.
One only hopes that the punished meted out to Clark serves as a deterrent to other hackers from such crimes.
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