Thousands of people do things similar to this all the time, but this case should involve whether or not he intended to do such damage. Once something like that gets out of control, it's not really something that could just be stopped all that easliy. If his network had never been used for attacks or other malicious purposes, then I don't beleive this sentence should hold. True enough it caused many problems, but at most, that should alert the department of defense on their security, and make them question how safe their systems REALLY are. If a simple bot can compromise it, then imagine someone intending to compromise it.

It's wrong to do something like this in the first place, true. But given an opportunity to make this kind of money doing next to nothing, many people probably would jump to do the same thing. I've known tons of people to do similar things, but it gets old, and even though the money is good, they all grew out of it and eventually started working on helping secure against things like it, etc.

I dunno... lots can be said about this, but I look at it more as a wake up call, than something that should be punished. After all, nobody was hurt in the process. Only made aware that their system's security should be updated and checked more regularly. My two sense.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/newsbriefs/204/967#967