Helen F. Fahey, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, announced today that Eric Burns, age 19, who used the computer screen name "ZYKLON," of Shoreline, Washington, was sentenced before the Honorable James C. Cacheris to 15 months imprisonment, 3 years of supervised release, and was ordered to pay $36,240 in restitution.

Burns pled guilty on September 7, 1999 to intentionally hacking a protected computer and causing damage.  The defendant admitted that he had hacked and damaged computers in Virginia, Washington state, Washington, D.C., and London, England, including computers hosting the United States Information Agency and NATO pages on the World Wide Web, and the vice-president of the United States' Web page known as "21st Century.gov."  The defendant also admitted that he had advised others on how to hack computers at the White House in May 1999.

Burns designed a program he called "Web Bandit" to identify computers on the Internet that were vulnerable to attack.  Using that program, he found that the computer server at electric press in Reston, Virginia, which hosted the Web pages for USIA, NATO, and the Vice-President, was vulnerable to attack.  Between August 1998 and January 1999, Burns hacked Electric Press server four times.  These attacks affected United States Embassy and Consulate Web sites, as well as others, that were dependent on USIA for  information.  On one occassion, the defendant's conduct made thousands of pages of information unavailable and resulted in the closing down of the USIA Web site for eight days.

Burns also attacked the Web pages of approximately 80 businesses whose pages were hosted by LASER.NET in Fairfax, Virginia, the Web pages of two coporate clients of issue dynamics in Virginia and Washington, D.C., the Web page of the University of Washington, and the Web servers of the Virginia Higher Education Council in Richmond, Virginia, and an Internet service provider in London, England.  The defendant usually replaced the attacked Web pages with his won, which often had references to himself as "ZYKLON" and to his love for a woman named "CRYSTAL."

In May 1999, the White House Web server was attacked, and there was an attempt to replace it with a page that had references to "ZYKLON" and "CRYSTAL."  The White House was alerted to the attempt and had to shut down the Web server, disconnect both the public and private computer networks from the Internet for two days, and reconfigure the computer system.  Although Burn took credit during Internet Chat sessions for the attack, both before and after it was discovered, he told the court that he had simply provided advice to others about how to do it.

Burns admitted that his intrusions had caused damages exceeding $40,000.

This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Secret Service, and was prosecuted for the United States Attorney's Office by Assistant United States Attorney Jack Hanly.