John Bombard, 32, of Seminole, Fla., pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Patti Saris in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to two counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization.

Bombard will be sentenced on March 7. He faces up to two years in prison, to be followed by one year of supervised release, and a US$100,000 fine.

Officials from Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai could not be reached for comment. The company distributes online content and business processes over a network of computer servers.

According to a statement by U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan, on June 14, 2004, Bombard intentionally accessed, without permission, computer systems at Columbia University in New York and Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. On those computer systems was a program that had been placed on the computers without permission that enabled Bombard to communicate with a network of computers he controlled in various locations on the Internet.

Bombard compromised those computer systems using a variant of the Gaobot worm and then allegedly directed communication from the university computer systems to the bot network from a computer located on his domain, "f0r.org," Sullivan said previously.