A Minnesota teenager has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and 10 months of community service, after he pleaded guilty to launching a variant of the Blaster worm in 2003. Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Hopkins, MN., was a high school senior when he downloaded and modified the worm, the Associated Press reported. His variant launched a distributed denial-of-service attack against a Microsoft Corp. Web site and personal computers. The government estimated the variant infected more than 48,000 computers.
Now, the jail time is pretty rough. However, rather than serving a set amount of time for community service, as judge, I would have had the kid indentify each of the 48,000 computers he intentionally disrupted and have him spend the equivalent amount of community service time it took each of the computer owners to fix their computer. I bet that would be a LOT longer than 10 months. And, if the computer owners lost any money because of this jerk’s actions, he would have to make retribution.
If someone damages your car, we have an entire industry ready to fix any dent. For reasons I don’t understand, intentionally damaging someone’s computer just doesn’t seem to carry the same weight. Maybe when it does, writing viruses won’t seem so cute.
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