A 20 year old California man pleaded guilty Thursday to building a massive botnet that knocked out critical care systems at a Seattle hospital and compromised computers belonging to the U.S. military. When building a botnet, please take pains to avoid herding machines used to care for the sick or, say, conduct top secret weapons research for the military, okay? That’s the lesson in the latest news from Washington State where 20 year old botherder Christopher Maxwell pleaded guilty yesterday to charges of “Conspiracy to Intentionally Cause Damage to a Protected Computer” and Commit Computer Fraud, and Intentionally Causing or Intending to Cause Damage to a Protected Computer.” Phew! That’s a mouthful. The long and short of it is that Maxwell, of Vacaville, California, created a “botnet” that included computers from sensitive military networks and those belonging to Seattle’s Northwest Hospital, where his online activities caused a major computer disruption last year: doors to the operating rooms didn’t open, pagers used by physicians did not work and computers in the intensive care unit shut down. Nice.Maxwell and his buddies also managed to rope in 400 systems belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense computer systems at the Headquarters 5th Signal Command in Manheim, Germany and the Directorate of Information Management in Fort Carson, Colorado. According to the DOJ, Maxwell and two unnamed co-conspirators created their botnet to distribute adware and rake in the dollars. The scheme earned them $100,000 in fraudulent payments from adware companies that had their software installed.Maxwell will be sentenced in August and could face up to ten years in prison and a quarter million dollar fine. That’s in addition to the $390,000 in damages he owes Northwest Hospital and the government to clean up their computers. Security