A federal judge in Philadelphia sentenced a University of Pennsylvania student who directed large-scale botnet attacks to three months in jail and nine months of confinement in a halfway house and at home, according to a report on The New York Times’ Web site.
The student, Ryan Goldstein, will be on probation for five years. He also will be required to pay the government a $30,000 fine and to pay the university $6,100 in restitution because one of its servers crashed while Mr. Goldstein was using it to conduct an attack using a 50,000-machine botnet. A botnet is a network of computers that have been made into digital zombies controlled by a hacker or hackers.
After negotiating with prosecutors, Mr. Goldstein pleaded guilty in February to charges of aiding and abetting another computer hacker to break into a computer remotely. He could have been sentenced to up to six months in jail. —Lawrence Biemiller
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