Thomas James Frederick Smith and David Anthony Edwards are facing five years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 on charges that they assembled a 22,000 node botnet and then trained it on two ISPs to demonstrate to a prospective buyer what it was capable of doing.
Smith will plead guilty before a federal judge in Dallas on June 10th while Edwards has already pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Jane J. Boyle on April 29 and is set to be sentenced on August 19th. Smith's case was set for trial next week before he accepted the charges against him were true. Smith and Edwards masterminded the 2006 computer attacks The Planet and T-35 Hosting.
According to the federal prosecutors, Smith and Edwards, nicknamed Zuck and Davus by their hacker friends, developed a botnet named Nettick and tried to sell it to cyber criminals for the price of $0.15 per infected computer.
In a bid to show their expertise in handling Nettick and to demonstrate its capabilities, they allegedly unleashed Nettick on a system hosted by The Planet, launching an August 2006 DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on the ISP.
Six weeks later they targeted their next cyber victim, Texas Web hosting provider T35 Hosting. They broke into it stole the company's database of usernames and passwords and then defaced T35's Web site, posting this data to the public.
T35 is very well known because it is the free ISP that had hosted the Web site of Joe Stack, the one who in his ire with the IRS had crashed his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.
Moments after the attack, Smith allegedly posted a message to the HelptingWebmasters.com pretending to be an innocent witness to his own perpetrated incident.
"I found out today at around 11:40 PM that the t35 Website was Completly [sic] defaced," Smith wrote in the post. "I posted it to a few news sites and noticed after posting them that the Mysql dumps were actually up for grabs... How are all the users going to be compensated? Im [sic] sure EVERYONES [sic] password was in that file...".
