Young hacker pleads guilty

We hear about "hackers" who take control of zillions of home PCs and use them to send out spam, but they're pretty shadowy figures. This week's news puts a "face" on one of these guys: 20-year-old "Jeanson James Ancheta, of Downey, Calif., pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles federal court to four felony charges" of hijacking hundreds of thousands of computers," the Associated Press reports. He faces six years in prison and a fine and will have to turn over his profits and a 1993 BMW he apparently bought with is earnings. Those earnings came from infecting people's computers with a virus that opened a "back door" allowing him to take control of them, then renting out the use of them to spammers. Hijacked computers are called "zombies" that are grouped together into "botnets" (zombie or bot networks) to do certain tasks like spamming or launching denial-of-service attacks that shut down large retail sites for the purpose of extortion or "protection" money. Working with an even younger malicious hacker in Florida (ID'd by his screenname "SoBe" because he's a minor), Ancheta advertised their botnets on Internet relay chat (IRC) channels. They reportedly made $58,000 during their "14-month hacking spree." Prosecutors say Ancheta wrote in IRC chat that he was hoping this could help him delay getting a job.