Ancheta, of Downey, Calif., will serve 57 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release for violating provisions of the U.S. Computer Fraud Abuse Act and the CAN-SPAM Act, according to the sentence handed down in Los Angeles by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner. The sentence is one of the longest ever given for spreading computer viruses, according to a statement by the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles.

At one time, Ancheta, who is 20, controlled a network of more than 400,000 zombie computers or "bots." He built and controlled the network using a unique variant of the Trojan horse program called "rxbot."

Ancheta used commands sent over Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to instruct the bot machines to scan for and infect other vulnerable computers, launch coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on behalf of customers who rented access to the botnet, or distribute spam and adware.

Ancheta pled guilty to the charges in January and promised to pay damages to the U.S. military for compromising systems belonging to the Computers Weapons Division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

The government also confiscated US$60,000 in cash and Ancheta's BMW.