A 23-year-old Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to charges that he attempted to sell access to Energy Department supercomputers he unlawfully accessed.
The US Department of Justice announced the guilty plea to one count of conspiracy and two counts of computer intrusion.
According to a plea bargain with Massachusetts federal authorities, Andrew Miller, who remains free pending his sentencing in November, faces up to 18 months behind bars.
Miller, a member of the hacking group the Underground Intelligence Agency, was arrested and indicted in June. Court documents claim that between 2008 and 2011, he remotely hacked into several computers in Massachusetts and elsewhere, secretly installing backdoors into several of them.
A backdoor essentially provides root access, or administrator-level access to the compromised machines. Once Miller obtained the log-in credentials of the compromised machines, he and his co-conspirators sold the backdoor access.
The purchaser would then have unauthorised access to various commercial and government computer networks.
How he did it
Miller gained access to the supercomputers by hacking into a Japanese university that had connections to them, the court documents claim.
Miller told FBI agents that he also had access to the supercomputers via Harvard University and the University of California at Davis.
He also pleaded guilty to propositioning an undercover FBI agent in an online chat session. Using the handle "Green", Miller offered to sell the agent root access to the supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centre, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab California, for $50 000.
The research centre houses some of the world's most powerful computers and provides high-end computing power for Energy Department-approved projects.
During the chat, he bragged that he had previously breached the corporate servers of American Express, Yahoo, Google, Adobe, WordPress, and other companies and universities.
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