Hacking duo’s trial date set for November

American Chronicle reports that a trial date is set for Thomas Smith and David Edwards, two young men from Texas and South Carolina that allegedly conspired to damage a protected computer and to commit computer fraud. They have both pleaded “not guilty” to the indictment, and remain free until the day of the trial – November 16, 2009.

Smith (aka Zoot, aka TJ, aka kingsmith007) and Edwards (aka Davus) allegedly worked together from summer 2004 through October 2006 to create a IRC botnet (a large network of computers that execute commands sent to it via a IRC server) that would allow them to deploy a Distributed Denial of Service attack against a chosen target.

They have also gained unauthorized access to websites, then proceeded either to deface them (change the content) or, as they did with a webhost server, to publish the list of clients it served. They also tried to sell the botnet they created. To demonstrate what it’s capable of, they flooded the IP address belonging to a Texas hosting provider.

If proven guilty, they could get as much as 5 years in prison and a half-a-million dollars fine (plus restitution).