Hacker attacks eBay

Date: December 29, 2005
Source: mercurynews.com


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.
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