US man charged over Akamai DDoS attack

A Florida man has been charged with launching a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against servers run by Akamai Technologies.

A federal court in Boston heard charges that 32-year-old John Bombard of Seminole used a variant of the Gaobot email worm to turn computers - including systems at two universities whose names have not been disclosed - into an arsenal of zombies or 'bots' that he could control remotely.

He then used this botnet of hijacked computers to send a massive amount of traffic to the DNS servers of the Global Traffic Management division of Akamai, prosecutors alleged. Akamai provides caching services for websites belonging to big-name companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, among others.

This DDoS attack, launched on 15 June, 2004, rendered many of Akamai's clients' websites temporarily inaccessible, according to the charges.

The charges of hacking, or "intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorisation", carry potential penalties of up to two years' imprisonment and a $200,000 fine.

Caroline McCarthy writes for CNET News.com