21 year old Christopher Maxwell was sentenced on Friday to 37 months in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to operating an botnet that was responsible, among other things, for knocking a Seattle hospital offline, according to a statement released Friday by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Westernd District of Washington. 21-year-old Christopher Maxwell was sentenced on Friday to 37 months in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to operating a botnet that was responsible, among other things, for knocking a Seattle hospital offline, according to a statement released Friday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington. Maxwell pled guilty in May to operating the botnet, which was used to do earn money through DDOS attacks, spam and identity theft. Maxwell’s botnet, at its height, included U.S. military computers from the Headquarters 5th Signal Command in Manheim, Germany and the Directorate of Information Management in Fort Carson, Colorado. In one two week spam in February of 2005, Maxwell’s bots reported infections on 629,000 unique IP addresses. At sentencing, Judge Marsha J. Pechman stated that Maxwell’s crime shows “incredible self-centeredness” with little regard for the impact on others. The three year sentence is necessary for “deterrence for all those youth out there who are squirreled away in their basements hacking.”Which strikes me as a bit broad. Shouldn’t she mean “squirreled away in their basements operating botnets”? After all, there’s a big difference. Security