According to Assistant United States Attorney Matthew D. Segal, a prosecutor with the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property section of the U.S. Attorney's Office who is handling the case, the Indictment alleges that King used a "botnet" to attack computer servers. A botnet is a network of infected computers that, unbeknownst to their owners, are compromised by a hacker and programmed to respond to a hacker's commands. The infected computers are referred to as "bots," "zombies," or "drones."
According to documents filed with the court, King allegedly controlled over seven thousand such "bots" and used them to conduct multiple distributed denial of service attacks against Web sites of two businesses. In a distributed denial of service attack, a hacker directs a large number of infected computers ("bots") to flood a victim computer with information and thereby disable the target computer. On the Internet, King was also known as "Silenz, Silenz420, sZ, GregK, and Gregk707."
When agents went to arrest King at his residence this morning, he went out the back door of the residence carrying a laptop computer, depositing it in the bushes in the backyard. Agents obtained a warrant to search King's backyard and seized the computer. King was arrested and is expected to appear before a U.S. Magistrate Judge in Sacramento today.
The maximum statutory penalty for a violation of transmission of damaging code to a protected computer is ten years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. However, the actual sentence will be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables, and any applicable statutory sentencing factors.
