Viruses/Worms News

Nugache worm creator gets 5 years probation

Thursday, April 30, 2009

A judge in Cheyenne, Wyoming sentenced the creator of the Nugache worm to five years of probation on Tuesday, after a plea agreement with prosecutors in which hacker Jason Milmont admitted to creating the worm that infected up to 15,000 computers.

Milmont, 20, used the worm to create a botnet of infected PCs for the purpose of identity theft and credit card fraud, according to Computerworld.com.

A network security researcher said Milmont used peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to control the botnet, but more successfully than the creators of the Conficker worm.

Dave Dittrich, a researcher at the University of Washington who has studied Nugache, said he was surprised to learn the worm had been created by a teenager.

"It was a completely different way of controlling a bunch of computers and makes it much harder to find the person who was controlling them," Dittrich said, according to the website.

In addition to the probation, Milmont was ordered to pay $36,859 restitution in monthly payments of $250, according to Computerworld.com.
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