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Botmaster Underground Member, Guilty of PC crimes

Hacker James Ancheta, Botmaster Underground member, pleads guilty to conspiracy, damaging computers used by the U.S. government and fraud

20-y.o. Jeanson James Ancheta, famous hacker part of the "Botmaster Underground" network, pleads guilty, following his arrest in November 2005. He could face upto 25 years of detention, though he will probably serve 5-7 years.

He was a master of bot net attacks, meaning that he had a program installed on various computers across the world that gave him access to its resources (e.g band width), allowing him through a network of such bots to launch a very powerful simultaneous attack on a target by combining resources of each computer in the bot-controlled-network.

His targets included computers from the Weapons Division of the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center and the U.S. Department of Defense.

He will hand USD15,000 to the Weapons Division and to the US Department of Defense. He is also to give up what he earned by hacking and lending his bot-network to other hackers (USD60,000, a BMW and PC gear).

U.S. Attorney's spokesman, Thom Mrozek:

"Mr. Ancheta was responsible for a particularly insidious string of crimes. He hijacked somewhere in the area of half a million computer systems. This not only affected computers like the one in your home, but it allowed him and others to orchestrate large scale attacks."