Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, will be imprisoned at a low-security jail and must perform 10 months of community service for unleashing a Internet worm that crippled 48,000 computers in 2003. The Internet "has created a dark hole, a dungeon if you will, for people who have mental illnesses or people who are lonely," Judge Marsha Pechman told the Seattle court. "I didn't see any parent standing there saying, 'It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.'" Defense lawyers said Parson feared leaving the house and his parents provided little support. Parson pleaded guilty last year to attempting to cause damage to a protected computer and to, "modifying the Blaster Internet worm and using it to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against a Microsoft Windows update Web site as well as personal computers"
Parson's W32.Blaster-B variant first appeared just days after W32.Blaster-A first appeared. Blaster-B used a different file name, teekids.exe, as opposed to the original msblast.exe.

The worm was programmed to take advantage of a vulnerability in the Distributed Component Object Model interface component of Windows, which handles messages sent using the remote procedure call protocol, to spread itself over the Internet and launch denial-of-service attacks against popular Web sites, including Microsoft's Windows Update Web site.