Botneter Gets Max of 20 Years In Prison And $500,000 Fine

Gregory C. King, of Fairfield, California, pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony counts of transmitting code to cause damage to protected computers. King, an irascible hacker who used monikers including Silenz, SilenZ420 and Gregk707, faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison and a fine of $500,000, although his plea agreement calls for him to spend two years behind bars and pay restitution to his victims. Sentencing is scheduled for September 3.

King's distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on CastleCops and KillaNet Technologies were so potent that the sites and their service providers sustained as much as $70,000 in damage, according to court documents. Unlike more sophisticated hackers who take pains to cover their tracks, King frequently taunted his victims in online chat rooms even as he flooded their servers with as much as 1 gigabyte of data per second.