Cheyenne Computer Hacker Pleads Guilty

A Wyoming resident, Jason Michael Milmont, aged 19 years, has admitted to a serious criminal charge of developing software that compromised several thousand computers across the nation and captured credit card details.

Milmont of Cheyenne pleaded guilty on August 13, 2008 in Casper-based federal court before Michael Shickich, the US Magistrate, to illegal infiltration into a user's computer to commit fraud.

The Office of U.S Attorney in Los Angeles, which introduced the suit against Milmont, says the accused created a malicious piece of computer code with which he clandestinely infected other users' computers when they tried to retrieve Limewire, a P2P software-sharing application. StarTribune published this in news on August 16, 2008.

Milmont now faces a maximum of five years in jail for committing the crime, a maximum of $250,000 in fine, supervised release for three years, and a compulsory assessment of $100. The Office of U.S. Attorney said that Milmont is already willing to pay almost $74,000 in restitution.

Meanwhile, prosecutors say that Milmont is blamed for taking control of 5,000-15,000 computers nationwide at any point in time. Also, according to them, Milmont's case represents the first instance in the country of charging someone for using a Peer-to-Peer program to infect people's computers.

Besides, as per the plea settlement between Milmont and the federal government established on June 26, 2008 after prosecutors introduced the case in Los Angeles, Milmont ran a 'botnet'. This botnet, a network of infected computers to perform routine malicious functions automatically, was operated to compromise other computers during March 8-September 2, 2007.

The settlement also indicated that the software that Milmont developed harvested data from a large number of computers via a southern California online business as well as transferred that data to Milmont's PC in Cheyenne. Once the defendant was able to gain the data, he would use it to acquire account information, and more significantly, start controlling those accounts. Trib.com published this in news on August 16, 2008.

Nevertheless, prosecutors said that Milmont wasn't essentially the only developer of the Nugache worm, for several programmers commonly develop such computer programs over time.

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» SPAMfighter News - 27-08-2008

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