Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The author of a botnet program that infected more than 15,000 machines last year has been caught by authorities.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Jason Michael Milmont, 19, has since pleaded guilty to federal felony offences at a court hearing in his home town of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The Nugache worm, as Milmont's program is known, is attributed as being one of the first to use peer-to-peer filesharing to spread.
He first distributed the botnet by offering users a modified version of the Limewire program which would then spread to other machines once it had been installed.
Its virulence was also increased via instant messaging programs, with users invited to view infected photos on fake MySpace and Photobucket pages.
Milmont told the paper in an email: "Most of the illegal activity took place before I was 18 and I wouldn't do it today."
Earlier this year Network World reported that the Nugache worm had the potential to overtake the Storm virus as the the world's most dangerous botnet.
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