All of the following is predicated on the assumption that King is guilty as charged. If he's not, then it applies to whoever actually is.

The kid's a useless scumbag sociopath. Lock him up and throw away the key. Better yet, deport him to France.

France is a nice place. People enjoy living there. Why not deport him somewhere they don't have internet connections?

am loving the way the fartknocker has a resemblance to Dade "ZeroCool/Crash Override" Murphy from the film hackers lol

i mean if he had "hacked a gibson" rather than convincing idiots to do something stupid e.g. "click to see Britney's tits" (when u can google her gash in seconds...) then that would be something i guess.

but his whole i owned a herder and snarfed his botnet is laughably poor, on par with saying to a cop, "honestly i found this weed in my pocket by the bus stop and was looking for a cop to give it too, but i couldnt stop running cus i had to keep my heart rate in the 'zone'..."

still hopefully for the vindictive sod he will getting his 'v plates' (and other parts of his anatomy) torn to shreds in prison

cell mate : so what did you do to get in here?

king : i got cought with a headshot bot on, in game of counterstrike and got banned from the server, so i took down the guys servers with my "l33t"(tm) skills, u?

cell mate : i fed a guy his extremities b4 beating him to death with a 2x4 with nails in it

king : oh.....i dont suppose your the bitch?

cell mate : no

"retributive justice" is just another way of saying "getting even" which is the same thing King was doing. That mentality never solves anything. The kid obviously has issues and should be punished if found guilty, but the whole "make an example of him" sounds just as bad as it did when the RIAA when after the kids. Punishment needs to be fair and consistent. Not one out of fifty becoming a publicity stunt, while the rest are ignored.

He hasn't had his day in court, let alone been sentenced. Its a bit early to pass judgment on his punishment. Unless you consider anything short of dropping all the charges overkill?

Twenty years ago he would have been breaking windows and slashing tires, now its digital vandalism.

make a big thing out of it, their sooo terrible at catching "hackers"

(i use that word loosely)

their punishment is harsh, because their embarrassed @ their own ineptitude!

"a resemblance to Dade "ZeroCool/Crash Override" Murphy from the film hackers lol"

I think he looks like the baddy from The Karate Kid. William Zabka. Boo. Hiss.

"He hasn't had his day in court, let alone been sentenced."

He looks guilty of something. It would be more entertaining if *someone* was caught, even if it was the wrong person. Send him down for life - and when he dies, mummify his corpse and put it on an Incan mountaintop with a sign around his neck saying "All crime is committed by the living".

Its a good kick in the arse he's needing!

Efros

.. I mean look at his picture? What a weeny fag, no wonder he had to overcompensate when he got into an argument and ddos everyone in site.

I blame the school hall bullies...

Make the little bastard compute pi to 10,000,000 places to the right of the ., with a slide rule.

Why don't these people buy Gigabit links and just employ the terrible action of banning any IP at the edge ( their provider with the 100Gbit links will be doing this) of anyone who wants to visit their site more than once per second per hour.

because of this guys crap and why worry if he's guilty or not he plainly is. He won't do significant jail time he will be back ddosing inside of a year because the truly evil are never punished properly.

"why worry if he's guilty or not he plainly is"

Well, what a great way to enforce the "innocent until proven guilty" clause that is desperately trying to hang on to its ledge in the judicial system nowadays.

I'm glad you are so good at determining guilt. I am even gladder, though, that a real judge is actually going to require proof before condemning someone, even if the guy in the pic has a face worthy of wearing a bag all day long.

I totally despise what the person guilty of these actions has done, but before I start despising a guy named King for those acts I prefer having read proof that he is indeed the one who did it.

look at all the outcry at the script kiddie! This guy may have used some technology to gain a botnet, but look at what he did - used sites he targeted from his own IP, used passwords that matched on multitudes of sites. That mistake is on a primary school engineer, black, grey or white, would not make.

I see all of you decrying this "hacker," but let look at what he did? Hes just a guy with some scripts who didnt know how to cover his tracks. Hacker? Probably not.

Hell would be by far the most appropriate place.

He's destined to go there anyway -- but a public hanging would be fully justified, to get him there quicker.

Just think the time it can take to reinstall all the computers he compromised.

Be conservative: 15.000 computers, and at least an hour (my guess is that they should be formatted -> 3-4 hours at least).

That is 15.000 hours. -> roughly two years.. but 6 years working time. He should be jailed those 6 years just for the botnet.

Now, add the DOS attacks and damages. At least 4 more years.

Now take in account the menaces: 2-3 years.

13 years seem fair just for these crimes, plus 700.000€ in damages for the bots, plus damages for DOS. And he should pay that when he comes out of jail.

"Myg0t, which bills itself as an online gaming authority."

I do hope that was sarcasm. ;)

people quoting ridiculous jail terms for something as silly as this. A much better use of the money used for incarcerating him would be to properly educate computer users into not getting bluffed into botnets in the first place. An even better use of the money would be to lock up a rapist for 40 more years, but I forget, he is 'truly evil'.

Also, myg0t are not a 'gaming authority', they are a long established community who cheat and annoy people as much as possible in online games.

Absolutely.

Mitnick was in jail for around five years - most of that was before his trial. He also spent eight or nine months in solitary confinement - although he hadn't actually been charged with anything at that point.

Very good article BTW.

I can understand why all the harsh penalty figures are being bandied about - the authorities are trying to send the message that anyone else they catch doing that kind of thing will also be severly dealt with. Deterence through fear of the consequences.

Unfortunately, if they can only apply this kind of punishment to the ones they can catch, serious criminals have nothing to fear. The overt in-your-face nature of the attacks is why he was caught, not the methods he used.

The message really just comes out as "If you're a crap loser, we'll send you down!"

"Its a good kick in the arse he's needing!"

It won't be a kicking his arse receives!

12 months answering really idiotic pre-sales calls for the iPhone at Infinity Loop followed by another 12 months doing techsupport for Microsoft on Vista. That should drive the boy into a straitjacket within 2 years I guess.

I strongly suspect that sending this boy to prison isn't going to do anything except make an amateur cracker with a serious personality disorder into a very unpleasant and experienced criminal with a major case of hatred against the people he focuses upon as having 'sent' him to jail.

Just give the zit a proper job to fill his obviously excessive spare time. Something, like, oh, I dunno... Picking trash on the beaches of Diego Garcia, or mowing the grass at Thule AFB: http://www.thule.af.mil/

Sad , some of the comments remind me of the attitude of those that supported the Salem Witch trials of another century !

The fact this man has strong anti social behavioral problems is self evident , locking him up a total bunch of other sociopaths for two or so decades is unlikely to effect a cure and will undoubtedly exacerbate his mental illness problems and make him into a true fruitcake nut job !

Interestingly , no one has pointed out these so called bot net creators could function if it was not for the stupid owners failing to properly maintain and secure their systems or use an operating system more impervious to this remote take over !

So , if you are willing to hang the general , then for true justice you should liquidate all his troops at the same time , you can't have it both ways !

An interesting conundrum , lock him up deny him the medical treatment he needs , and then ignore those incompetent computer slackers , leaving the army for some other bum to find and run and cause more net mayhem ?

What price a choice indeed ?

The *really* sad thing is that stupidity, cluelessness, and general ignorance are not usually criminally punishable. So you can't bust the zombies, but you can bust the guy who animated them and directs their activities.

This script kiddie really does have some serious anti-social attitudes and problems, which I why I suggest giving him some meaningless activity far from people and society to fill his time. No need to actually lock him up, just impose a social exile on him until he grows up a bit.

The debate on whether incarceration helps or hinders the rehabilitation of offenders is an old (and rather complex) one. I for one think if he is guilty then yes he needs to be punished with time inside, but he should then be obliged to undergo a scheme designed to rehabilitate him more fully - working with bullies or their victims for example (without pay of course)

Blaming the masses for being infected with bots in the first place is a tad harsh though. My default Windows install is full of holes (my record so far is <1min from connecting to the internet to download SP4 and the latest Zone Alarm to seeing LSASS throw a fault), my wireless router freely let packets in and out when I first plugged it in, people get given IE which is so deeply woven into the inner workings of Windows and full of holes, etc.

All of those are a minor annoyance for me to fix, but 99% of people wouldn't even know they needed fixing, never mind how to go about doing it. We are the lucky ones (as the song says), but not everyone has the time or energy to learn such stuff - they just want it to work out of the box, in much the same way I know bugger all about cars. I just want it to work. I don't want to find out I need to mod the thing before I can drive it without crashing or finding it's been nicked!

People are given crap software in a badly configured state and then they suffer for it. Don't blame the purchaser, blame the poor workmanship that made it, and the people willing to sell it.

PS Are the icons there to help amanfrommars gauge irony and sarcasm more easily?

Looks like he's off the be "Bubba's little b1tch". Obviously not as clever as he thought he was, since he got caught. But be quite a shock to realise there are REAL PEOPLE behind the internet and, if you p1ss them off in cyberspace, you p1ss them off in the real world. Where, despite your best efforts, you actually live. Or die, as the case may well turn out to be.

Sadly , today's incarceration system is full of corrupt warders from the lowest to the highest echelon , kick backs and excessive brutality are rampant and endemic , internal video systems capturing 95% of prison guard brutality routinely disappear , just as many prisoners are even beaten to death by the guards as are murdered by fellow inmates!

Some 60% plus inmates are either low level pot heads ,mentally unstable small time coke or ice addicts , some where between 5% and 10% are former violent mental home inmates , whose state run institutions were closed out from under in the so called late enlightenment age of the last two decades of the 20th century. Another 10% of the incarcerated are in jail because of a corrupt out of control justice system and are actually innocent of all the charges including capital murder , that put them there in the first place and the final 25% are well virtually career Pavlov's dog conditioned to excessive homicidal violence jailbirds who have become so acclimatised to the system they just cannot and will not live a normal non violent life outside the only world of brutality and order they will ever know !

Now throw into that eclectic mix , state authorities that contract these inmates into testing unknown drugs with side affects watered down when subject to first standard trial dug tests before human trials ! Also whacked out of their small brained mindless retarded shrinks playing god , and trialling excessive dosage psychopathic drugs! All in all a reminder of mental homes of the mid nineteenth early to mid twentieth centuries we read about in history books ! So you now have the unmitigated gall to say someone with this wankers mental and anger issues could be rehabilitated in such a retarded dysfunctional evil corrupt system of overcrowded brutalised prisons of the 21st Century and the answer will always be "No Way In Hell " ! It also explains why victimless criminals , serial drunk drivers and white collar non violent fraudsters and name cloners are on the short term revolving door syndrome , because there is just no room left to house these bums!

Oh by the way , how soon we forget the some 600, 000 thousand or so windoze machines worldwide that were infected by a well known but some what still morally bankrupt corporation now bankrolling second generation digital video push with next generation of even worse DRM ! The punishment for that was tap on the wrist and a token voucher for music worth less then nine cents in real money , for less then one third of those infected ! For countries outside of continental North America , infected customers were figuratively told to bugger off and don't bother coming back with your pathetic little claims for whilst we are wholly owned subsidiaries of New York Office and take direct orders at all times from them , we are not responsible for their evil sins period !

So by some comments here , using their convoluted revenge logic both the former CEO and Chairman of the Board of SONY-BMG would be jailed for a minimum of 100 years !

Or better still , please tase my iPhone it's a POS anyway , as it needs to be well and truly hacked to work on any other network outside " We illegally spy on you AT&T !" , oh how I long for a better much improved open source version not locked to the crap networks that Apple choose .

We live and learn from our mistakes, and then move on , well at least some of us do !

"both the former CEO and Chairman of the Board of SONY-BMG would be jailed for a minimum of 100 years !"

If there were such a thing as justice, that is PRECISELY what should have happened.

I blame the parents of course.

This guy obviously just wants to be loved....

Cut of his fingers..that'll learn him...if guilty of course....

How exactly is a denial of service attack 'victimless'? Some poor sucker has to pay for the bandwidth, and it can be a very large amount of money.