 
|
Bots, zombies, drones lead to indictment
SACRAMENTO October 2, 2007 5:47am 
• Fairfield man accused of hacking • Denial-of-service attacks are alleged Greg King, 21, of Fairfield has been indicted by a Central Valley federal grand jury on four counts of electronic transmission of codes to cause damage to protected computers.
He’s accused of using a “botnet” to attack computer servers, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Segal, a prosecutor with the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who is handling the case.
A botnet is a network of infected computers that, unbeknownst to their owners, are compromised by a hacker and programmed to respond to a hacker’s commands. The infected computers are referred to as “bots,” “zombies,” or “drones.”
According to documents filed with the court in Sacramento, Mr. King allegedly controlled over 7,000 such “bots” and used them to conduct multiple distributed denial of service attacks against Web sites of two businesses.
In a distributed denial of service attack, a hacker directs a large number of infected computers (“bots”) to flood a victim computer with information and thereby disable the target computer.
On the Internet, Mr. King was also known as “Silenz, Silenz420, sZ, GregK, and Gregk707,” the government says.
Comments on this story
Stasigr 10/29/07 1:30 PM
|
|
