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Hackers jailed in Britain

Jordan Bradley, a teenage member of an international hacking gang dubbed the Thr34t Krew, was still at his terminal when US and British detectives raided his parents' home in Darlington, County Durham, northern England, just before dawn.

On Friday, the computing enthusiast, who used the online name Phreeze, and his friend Andrew Harvey, known as Doom, were jailed at Newcastle crown court for controlling the TK worm that inflicted an estimated US$9.7 million in damage across the Internet.

Bradley, now a 21-year-old electrician, received three months and Harvey, 24, unemployed, of Sherburn, County Durham, was given six months.

"The reason for all this activity is power and ego to see how much you could do," Judge Beatrice Bolton said."This worm was capable of doing a lot more than you did with it. Public business and the computing community must have faith in their computers and you demonstrated that two young boys can interfere and for a long time get away with it."

Their ingenious program at one stage controlled as many as 50,000 machines, hijacking, among others, sites run by the US Department of Defense. They pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to conspiracy to cause unauthorized modification of computers. Counsel for the men, Robin Patton, insisted it had caused little damage.

"This is not a case where we have a business coming forward saying that they could not operate for three days."

Another member of the Thr34t Krew, Raymond Steigerwalt, 21, from Indiana, was jailed for 21 months earlier this year and ordered to pay US$12,000 compensation for damage to computers.

Once released on to the Internet, the TK worm exploited a known weakness in Microsoft programs. The compromised computers formed a "botnet," a hijacked network which could launch streams of emails in "distributed denial of service" attacks on other computers or Web sites.

The investigation began after a computer user in California found a strange file on his machine. Lieutenant Dan Seltenberger, who was then working for the local computer and technology crime high-tech response unit, said: "The TK worm is self-replicating. It's still out there and will be for years.

"It had the ability to take down significant portions of the Internet; it could have knocked out one of the 13 root servers which operate the Internet globally. What the kids did was pretty ingenious. They all had a talent. It's a shame they didn't put it to better use."
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