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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!
This was the guy who modified the Blaster worm. The original author never got caught.
...gardening! getting to know the REAL bugs out there!
Three rings for the Elven-kings in the sky
If you had a box that caught blaster there is nothing preventing you from taking this kid to civil court for damages.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
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
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.
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
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=
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.
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.