Teenaged hacker 'Coolio' faces jail

A teenaged hacker has agreed a plea bargain with US prosecutors that could send him to jail for a year if it is approved by a judge.

Dennis Moran, also known as Coolio, pleaded guilty to unauthorised access to computer systems and will remain free on bail until formal sentencing this spring. If the judge approves the plea bargain, the hacker will be jailed for between nine months and a year and forced to pay $5000 to each of three victims, according to Associated Press reports.

A plea bargain is a negotiated agreement between the defence and the prosecution in a criminal case in which the defendant pleads guilty to a specified charge in return for the promise of a lower sentence.

Moran defaced dare.com, a Los Angeles Police Department anti-drugs website, using a cartoon of Donald Duck with a hypodermic syringe in his arm alongside pro-drug messages. He also defaced rsa.com, the website of an internet security firm, and a US Commerce Department site which outlines rules for exporting chemicals that can be used to produce weapons.

The defacements occurred at around the same time as several denial of service (DoS) attacks against Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com which triggered an FBI investigation. Moran had initially been linked with the attacks but denied his involvement when the FBI raided his home last March.

Another teenaged hacker, 16 year-old Canadian 'mafiaboy' was later arrested and charged with the DoS attacks. He is currently out on bail awaiting trial.

Both could join Florida resident Jonathan James on the list of jailed US teenaged hackers. In September, James was sentenced to six months in a detention centre after he pleaded guilty to intercepting 3300 emails, and stealing passwords and data from 13 Nasa computers.

According to local US newspaper reports, James, who was 15 years old at the time of the attack, downloaded $1.7m in Nasa proprietary software before being caught, obliging Nasa to spend $41,000 to check and fix the system afterwards.