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The wheels of justice finally turned up a guilty verdict in a 2003 case where an Oregon man, working with others, used a 20,000 PC bot network to hit eBay with a DDoS attack.

Anthony Scott Clark is looking at 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine should a judge impose the maximum penalties in his case. Clark pleaded guilty in federal court in San Jose to participating in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against eBay according to a Department of Justice statement.

The attacks took place in July and August 2003. Clark and his associates used a worm to exploit a Windows RPC-DCOM vulnerability and gain control of some 20,000 PCs. This bot network was then used to attack eBay computers and caused a denial of service.

Federal authorities including the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force investigated the attacks. "It's not that frequently that you see people successfully prosecuted for participating in these attacks," Christopher Sonderby, chief of the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property unit in San Jose, told Mercury News.

A status hearing regarding sentencing has been set for April 3, 2006. That sentencing will depend on how much damage they determine was caused by Clark's attacks.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.