Teen pleads guilty to Blaster variant

SEATTLE: A teenager pleaded guilty for unleashing a variant of the Blaster worm that infected computers worldwide last year and targeted computers at Microsoft Corp., prosecutors said.

Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Hopkins, Minnesota, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Seattle, and faces a maximum of 37 months in prison and financial restitution that could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sentencing is scheduled for November.

Parson said in the plea agreement that he created his "B" or "teekids" variant of the Blaster worm and used it to access fifty computers which he then used to launch a broader attack on more than 48,000 computers.

"Sending out a computer worm may be viewed as a harmless prank," said John McKay U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, "But the damage to individual computer users is very real and the penalties are also very real."

Blaster and its variants are self-replicating Internet worms that bore through a security hole in Windows, Microsoft's operating system which is found on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.

Last August, Parson's worm also told infected computers to launch a denial of service attack on a Microsoft update page that would have fixed the flaw that the worm exploited. Microsoft had, however, changed its Web address in order to thwart the attack.

The Washington Cyber Task Force, which includes local law enforcement, the Seattle Division of the FBI and the Secret Service participated in the investigation with the assistance of Microsoft, McKay said.