Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Drops Blaster Author's Fine
bevo noted that Microsoft has dropped their fine against the author of the Blaster worm that DDoS'd Microsoft's web sites and hijaacked 50,000 computers. 225 hours instead of a 500k fine. $2200/hour seems like a good deal to me ;)
Luckily the community service cannot involve computers, otherwise this guy will get away lightly by cleaning up roughly 50 spyware/virus-infected Windows machines to clock up 225 hours.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said the sentence reflected that although he was 18 at the time of the attack, his maturity level was much younger than that. She also said his home life contributed to the problem.
Damn, that precedent means virtually everyone here on /. is immune from prosecution. For anything. Especially since "mom's basement" probably qualifies as a "home life".
John
How can MS "fine" someone? Are they really that close to the government now that they can hand out their own judgement and punishment?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
... by replacing himself by a shell script?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Thats not such a great TCO
This was the guy who modified the Blaster worm. The original author never got caught.
Billy boy dropped the fine was that he saw some of himself in the boy, totally ripping off someone elses work, rebranding it and sending out the door. It was just a variant, wasn't it?
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Life just ins't fair....
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
The article also contained this:
Jeffrey Lee Parson, of Minnesota, was sentenced this year to 18 months in prison and 10 hours of community service.
What the hell is the point of a day's worth of community service when you are also serving 18 months in prison!?
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
...gardening! getting to know the REAL bugs out there!
Three rings for the Elven-kings in the sky
To all the people screaming "What, MS is part of the government now?":
The judge determined that the convicted owed MS damages of about $500,000. MS at their own discretion opted to allow him to to do community service in lieu of cash. As long as the agreement is acceptable to both parties, the judge will generally go with it.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
So MS has been given judicial powers to grant clemency now?
Yes. They first used it for this case.
Um, I don't think you have to pay them. At all.
Another one bites the dust
Well, at least this kid didn't get a JOB offer from Microsoft. Seems he wasn't quite as lucky as the kid who hacked into T-Mobile and monitored Secret Service messages, only to get a job offer from them once he was caught...
...maybe when he matures and is looking towards real work, he'll consider a lucrative career in hacking government agencies, seems like breaking the law is rewarded nowadays.
It's not time for the tinfoil hats- yet. Microsoft isn't so close to the government that they can choose his sentence, but they could, if they wanted, ask the judge to reduce the sentence to certain terms that they think are fair.
Remember though, IANAL
I think it'd be great for this guy to get out in the sun and clean up graffiti! Maybe it'll build his character enough that he'll realize that making worms to smash Microsoft PCs isn't a cool thing to do- or is it?
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Yeah, the community service I got stuck with was sticking towels in a dryer at the YMCA. The people there were pretty cool - the guy who ran their whole community service program at this YMCA started working there after he did community service there. It wasn't quite as fun as the thing that got me there in the first place, but it wasn't a horrible way to spend my evenings for few weeks either.
I'm glad you think that way. Tell me where you live and break in to your home. Its your fault for have breakable glass windows or whatever other vulnerability I exploit to get in, so I shouldn't be punished if I get caught.
Oh, you still have to pay them. It's just that after it's all over you can easily get your money back.
Uh oh... I just described GTA.
RUN! IT'S THE GOVERNMENT!!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
What happens anyway in the US legal system if someone is fined a $500,000 when they have a few hundred bucks to their name, and no or low income?
An oversimplified answer is they file for bankruptcy protection, lose virtually all their posessions besides their primary residence, means of transport to work and other essentials and personal effects of no monetary value, need to have all significant expenses in the future approved by a judge and so on till they emerge from bankruptcy. Then they spend about 10 years unable to get a credit card or bank loan because their credit rating is so low.
Really. They just got some good press. And it is better to have good press worldwide that to have some teen own you $0,5M which he probably would never pay to them at all...
Helping Bill Gates with his first Gentoo install..
http://request-header.info
RTFA. Parsons was to have paid the $500,000 as restitution to Microsoft because the worm launched a rather feeble DDOS attack on Microsoft's websites. As such, Microsoft has the authority to waive that, or to make arrangements. Also, with no job, assets, or future, Parsons would have had no means to make the restitution payment, and would likely have had it dismissed in bankruptcy proceedings. Microsoft would never have seen a dime. Instead, Microsoft gets to look charitable and magnanimous while the kid gets to avoid bankruptcy. Sounds like a win-win deal to me.
bance.net
Trying to extract $500k from a 19yo kid would probably fetch them more bad press than any actual compensation they would receive. Instead they come across as being compassionate and understanding. Nothing strange about it... just a good PR move (which we all know has always been their primary strength)
Not superior software, superior service plans formerly but now only the market presence created by its history and effective monopoly status in the US keep the firm gaining income with any advantage over other PC software firms.
This kid still has to do 18 months in prison! 18 months! 13,128 hours! (linked from the same site)
18 months is almost 10% of the time this kid has even been on the planet!
Microsoft just helped him out by letting him live his life once he gets out of prison instead of being in debt for the next 40 years.
I bet it's extremely hard for a convicted felon to work off a $500,000 debt.
--
Fairfax Underground: For residents of Fairfax County and Northern Virginia
A better analogy would be if I made locks which, because of poor design choices, could all be easily opened with a screwdriver.
Then somebody breaks into 50,000 houses because they all used my inadequate locks.
The only fault of the homeowner would be trusting my product too much... but you can't really blame them for that either, since a lock manufacturer should know a thing to two about security!
=Smidge=
Show me where Microsoft makes the claim that their software is impregnable
Microsoft is getting pretty big and powerful and can push the DOJ around, but I don't think they're yet in the position to fine people.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Only in some states like Florida, I think. In others they can still repo your house and auction it.
I was hearing something on the OJ Simpson trial the other day which was being rehashed now that the lawyer died. AFAICT OJ "Magic Gloves" Simpson moved to Florida after the $30M civil suit he lost to avoid having his NFL pension garnished to pay for the judgement, and I think that Florida law also forbids your "primary residence" from being r00ted.
I might be wrong though.
It may be a good deal to the criminal in this case, but not to the rest of us computer users who have to put up with this type of worthless scum on a daily basis. If all the worm/virus/adware/spyware/hijack/root kit etc. writers and those who use their products to infect the rest of us were to disappear tomorrow, I, for one, wouldn't miss them for a moment. Life is tough enough already without humans preying on other humans.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...they should make him apologize, in person, to everyone affected by the worm.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
Just like how Bush has been accurately criticized for capitalizing on fear to push his agenda, many companies are now benefiting from fear in this context. Hell yes it was a bitch to deal with Blaster and friends, but I got paid cash money to remove it from a lot of people's computers. One time got some ass from it. So to those of us who are fans of capitalism and consumerism, or ass maybe, this is a Good Thing, and the economy has been helped more than it has been hurt by crap like this.
I always thought that a good community service activity was shoveling elephant poop at the zoo. 225 hours of poo shoveling would give this person some perspective as to the aguish they have caused! :-)
So, MS isn't going to try to extract several hundred thousand dollars from someone with no money or prospect of getting that sort of money, because it would cost more to hire a thug to shake down the punk than they would get. Hmmm.
See, MS can make a good decision on occasion...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I could hire an actress for a snuff film for less than $2200/hr.
Ok...I've admittedly led a somewhat sheltered suburban life but, how in God's name do you know this?
Quite possibly. I'm not defending Microsoft. I'm arguing that just because Microsoft's software is buggy doesn't make mean that people who explot those bugs are any less culpable.
a new worm has emerged which targets Linux exclusively. Reverse-engineering has thus far only revealed the string "!seineew era sreenigne xunil zes rekcah retsalB".
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Firstly that's not true, because nobody advertises their open ports... blaster and the other worms probe addresses, look through address books etc. and run scans and probes to find vulnerable computers. Secondly, even if you did that, nobody who stals stuff from your home can use that as a defense. Its unlikely that the cops would spend any effort to find the thief, since you acted so stupidly, but if the person were caught somehow they're still culpable.
So are you some kind of hotshot that can get any computer up and going in a vew minutes to an hour? Well, any monkey can format and re-install or restore-from-ghost in very short order, but in my experience it is those technicians that people call "useless" when they get their "fixed" computers back without properly configured drivers and all their email and data since their last weekly backup wiped out (if the said user is swift enough to even do a weekly backup).
In the corporate world competent techies have made it easy for themselves. They probably deal with a fleet of identical Dells, each issues with a standard ghost image, scripts up the wazoo, something like Altris or other big brother software do roll out updates/config changes, etc etc etc.
OTOH, 4.5 hours to clean up a machine is actually a realistic high-range estimate when you are talking about some of the personal computers or PCs at mom-and-pop operations out there like "nerds on site" and the like must see. I imagine they see everything from PIIs to the latest screaming PIV from any number of builders out there, and some of them are probably slapped together with leftover components too. These users don't have an image to restore to--unless you count the "rescue CD" if they haven't managed to lose it...they might not have any OS install CD at all! And backups? HAH! I've found you're lucky to even have weekly backups. And no matter how trivial their files look, all these users want to save as much as possible. These users are also rather undisciplined in their own maintenance. The worms and viruses are one thing--prepare to spend some time getting rid of adware attached to weather bugs, comet cursors, chat smileys and "free" P2P programs.
In any case, if you average it out you might spend 2 hours per machine. I'd say that for how much damage Blaster-variants caused this guy got off lightly--even including the hours he will spend in jail. I suppose, though, that suing someone who is broke for a half-million is pretty pointless. I DO like the idea of making the guy shovel elephant poo for a month as a substitute.
I do try to be optimistic though--one good thing is that this whole Blaster debacle brought to light the security crisis in Microsoft products. To this day, an unpatched win2k or pre-sp2 winxp machine will become infected within minutes when hooked up directly to a typical high-speed internet connection. It seems unfortunate that some jackass had to pull a stunt like Blaster before anything serious was done about security at MS.
Or you can take it straight from the horses mouth [search for apple]. Sure looks like they do a lot of work for Apple. If we compared Apples 622 documents to Microsofts 670 documents, they are pretty equal. And thats not a fair since Apple only has 3% market share.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
To use the normal
Remember this, "property rights" exist only because of our social conventions. Have you ever seen two dogs sharing a bone? Among animals, property always goes to the stronger one that wants it. So, to have any rights to your property, you should follow social conventions. One of these conventions is that you should take reasonable steps to protect your property when the circumstances make it necessary.
You may sleep with open doors if you live in a farm somewhere, but not in a poor inner city neighborhood. Likewise, you must be sure to lock your system if you ever connect to the internet. If you don't do it, then you are guilty of the crime of creating an environment where cybercrime propagates.
Again, dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. Comments?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.