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 Teen Pleads Guilty to Releasing Blaster Worm Variant
August 16, 2004
A teenager pleaded guilty on Wednesday for unleashing a variant of the Blaster worm that infected computers worldwide last year and targeted computers at Microsoft Corp.
Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19 years old from the state of Minnesota, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Seattle, and faces a maximum of 37 months in prison and financial restitution that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sentencing is scheduled for November.
Parson said in the plea agreement that he created his "B" or "teekids" variant of the Blaster worm and used it to access fifty computers which he then used to launch a broader attack on more than 48,000 computers.
When asked for the reason of his attack, the young man told authorities he was unsure at the moment about what he was doing. "Sending out a computer worm may be viewed as a harmless prank," said John McKay U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, "But the damage to individual computer users is very real and the penalties are also very real."
Blaster and its variants are self-replicating Internet worms that take advantage of security holes in Windows, an operating system found on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.
The W32.Blaster-B variant of the Blaster worm first surfaced on the internet a year ago, days after the appearance of W32.Blaster-A. Blaster-B used the filename, Teekids.exe, rather than the original MSBlast.exe.
The worm exploited a protocol handling vulnerability in Windows to spread itself and launch denial-of-service attacks against popular websites, including Microsoft's Windows Update site. Microsoft had, however, changed its Web address in order to thwart the attack.
The teenager was tracked down last year by the FBI and the US Secret Service. Officials first got on Parson's trail after tracking down ownership of an internet domain, www.t33kid.com, used by Blaster-B to download instructions and report on infected hosts. Domain name data led officials to Parson's father's home where Parson was arrested and seven computers seized.
Parson admitted modifying the original Blaster worm and creating the Blaster-B worm variant, calling it Teekids after his online name.
Still, the creators of original W32.Blaster-A are at large, the US$250,000.00 reward promised by Microsoft leading to the capture of the those individuals hasn't yet been collected.
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