Teen gets 18 months in prison for worm

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com
31 January 2005 09:43 AM
Tags: worm, blaster, msblast, kawamoto, teen, dawn, prison, parson
A federal judge on Friday sentenced a 19-year-old Minnesota man to 18 months in prison for unleashing a variant of the MSBlast worm.

Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Minnesota was ordered to serve his time in a minimum security prison and participate in 10 months of community service.

FBI agents arrested Parson at his home in Hopkins, Minn., in August 2003, just two weeks after his "MSBlast.B" variant began to tunnel into Microsoft Windows-based computers. His variant of the worm infected approximately 48,000 computers that had not yet applied an earlier released patch.

Parson pleaded guilty last summer in a Seattle U.S. District Court to damaging federal government computers with MSBlast.B. At the time of his plea, he faced a possible prison sentence of 10 years and a US$250,000 fine.

The author of the original version of the MSBlast worm has yet to be caught.

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Talkback 2 comments

    18 months is not enough, he sh ...Anonymous -- 31/01/05

    18 months is not enough, he should of got 10 years the little ****

    That oughta learn ya! Whilst n ...Anonymous -- 02/02/05

    That oughta learn ya!
    Whilst not condoning cyber vandalism, I'm having a go at the "victims" and not the criminal.

    That should teach people to practice a bit more "online hygiene" and MS to clean up their act as well. If these users and software makers allow their system to be so vulnerable to childish pranks, imagine what easy targets they would be to a seriously malicious virus writer with a vendetta.

    Lucky this kid wasn't a terrorist with a grudge.

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