[ISN] Hacker pleads guilty in digital attack of eBay

[InfoSec News]

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/13502374.htm

By Michael Bazeley
Mercury News
Dec. 28, 2005

An Oregon man has pleaded guilty to charges he used a computer worm to
infect as many as 20,000 computers that then attacked eBay.com and
other Web sites two years ago.

Anthony Clark, 21, of Beaverton, Ore., entered his plea Tuesday
afternoon in San Jose federal court. He was charged with intentionally
damaging a protected computer. He will be sentenced in April and could
receive up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Clark and un-named accomplices launched a ``distributed denial of
service'' attack against eBay's auction Web site in the summer of
2003, automatically bombarding the site with massive amounts of
Internet traffic in an attempt to cripple the company's network.

Clark carried out the attack by using a worm program that hijacked
thousands of personal computers. The worm instructed the computers to
log in to an Internet Relay Chat server, where they waited for
instructions from Clark, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

The U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Attorney's Office Computer
Hacking and Intellectual Property unit in San Jose investigated the
case.

``It's not that frequently that you see people successfully prosecuted
for participating in these attacks,'' said Christopher Sonderby, chief
of the CHIP unit.

EBay declined to characterize the scope of the attack because the
court is still investigating the damages to decide Clark's sentence.

``I think the unique thing here is that we were able to trace it,''
said eBay spokesman Chris Donlay.

Clark's attorney could not be reached for comment.