Bot herder charged in Akamai attack

The US attorney’s office said yesterday that a Florida man has been charged in federal court with hacking into two computer systems as part of establishing a bot network from which he launched a denial of service (DoS) attack on computer servers managed by Akamai Technologies.

US Attorney Michael Sullivan and Kenneth Kaiser, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New England, announced that the aptly named John Bombard, age 32, of Seminole, Florida, was charged with two counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorisation.

Akamai, which load balances and distributes online content over a network of servers, alleges that on June 15, 2004, it suffered a significant increase in web traffic to a number of its DNS servers, caused by a DoS attack.

The affected Akamai customers had access to their respective websites slowed or rendered inaccessible for a period of time.

Akamai alleges that Bombard compromised these computer systems using a variant of the Gaobot worm, while Bombard directed communication to the bot network from a computer located on his domain, f0r.org.

If convicted, Bombard faces up to two years' imprisonment, to be followed by one year of supervised release and a $200,000 fine on each of the charges.