Zombie master pleads guilty to eBay Internet attack
December 29, 2005
Anthony Scott Clark, 21, of Beaverton, Oregon, and accomplices collected over 20,000 zombie computers that allowed them to attack the nameservers of eBay.com, causing a denial of service for legitimate users of the targeted system.
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, according to the U.S. attorney for the Northern 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, infected over 20,000 computers using a worm program which took advantage of a vulnerability in the computers running the Windows Operating System.
The collected "zombies" were passed on to a Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server protected by passwords, where they 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.
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.
Luke Macaulay, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, said that damages were estimated to be between "tens of thousands and millions" of dollars and that a judge would decide on the amount during Clark's sentencing hearing in April 2006.
EBay spokesman Chris Donlay declined to say what kind of damage the attacks caused, but welcomed news of the plea.
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