Teen Sentenced for Releasing Blaster Worm Variant
By GENE JOHNSON, AP


SEATTLE (Jan. 28) - A Minnesota man was sentenced Friday to 18 months in
prison and 10 months of community service after pleading guilty to
unleashing a variant of the Blaster Internet worm in 2003.



AP
Jeffrey Lee Parson, right, walks out of a federal courthouse in Seattle
with his lawyers following his sentence.


Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Hopkins, Minnesota, was a high school senior
when he downloaded and modified the worm. His variant launched a
distributed denial-of-service attack against a Microsoft Corp. Web site as
well as personal computers.

The government estimated Parson's version of Blaster crippled more than
48,000 computers.

Parson initially pleaded innocent, but changed his plea last summer to one
count of intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a protected
computer.


U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said she was sentencing him at the low
end of the agreed-upon range because although he was 18 at the time of the
attack his maturity level was much younger than that.

Parson will serve his time at a low-security prison. He had faced a maximum
penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 (191,790) fine.

"I know I've made a huge mistake and I hurt a lot of people and I feel
terrible," Parson told the judge.

Collectively, different versions of the virus-like worm, alternately called
LovSan or Blaster, snarled corporate computer networks worldwide, affecting
millions of machines.


01/28/05 15:42 EST

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