eBay hacker pleads guilty

Anthony Clark, the hacker who launched a massive Denial of Service Attack on eBay in 2003, has pleaded guilty. Clark had taken control of 20,000 computers and formed a "botnet". He redirected traffic coming from the controlled computers to eBay and temporarily made the popular Internet auction house unreachable. The twenty-one year old Oregon man could face up to ten years in prison.

Clark, along with others, inserted Trojan horse programs into vulnerable Windows computers. The infected computers, known as bots or zombie computers would regularly "phone home" by logging into an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) room specially set up by Clark. Clark sent an attack command which caused the computers to repeatedly request web pages from eBay.com and other servers. Even with eBay’s array of servers and massive bandwidth, the instant increase in traffic took the company offline.

eBay has repeatedly come under denial of service attacks and it’s prominent name is often used in phishing schemes as well.