From wire and staff reports

CASPER - A 19-year-old Wyoming resident has pleaded guilty to a felony charge related to the development of a program that took over thousands of computers nationwide to steal credit card information.

Jason Michael Milmont of Cheyenne pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in Casper before U.S. Magistrate Michael Shickich to one count of unauthorized access to a computer to conduct fraud.

Milmont faces up to five years in prison for the crime, up to a $250,000 fine, three years of supervised release, and a mandatory special assessment of $100. The U.S. Attorney's Office said Milmont has already agreed to pay nearly $74,000 in restitution.

According to prosecutors, Milmont developed a malicious computer code called the Nugache Worm, a modification of "peer-to-peer" software. Such software allows people to find and download music and videos on the Internet.

According to the plea agreement between Milmont and the government signed on June 26, he operated a "botnet" - a robot software program that performs repetitive functions automatically - to infect other computers from March 8 to Sept. 2, 2007.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, which opened the case against Milmont, says he developed a piece of malicious computer code that allowed him to infect other people's computers secretly when they retrieved a peer-to-peer software-sharing program called Limewire.

Milmont is accused of controlling from 5,000 to 15,000 computers across the country at any given time. Prosecutors say his case is the first in the nation in which a person has been charged with using such "peer-to-peer" software to infect other computers.

The computer code harvested information from thousands of computers through a southern California online business and sent that information to Milmont's computer in Cheyenne, according to the plea agreement. "After defendant gained the information, he would be able to use the captured information to gain pertinent account details, and more importantly, he could take control of the account."

Prosecutors have said that Milmont wasn't necessarily the sole author of the Nugache Worm. Such computer viruses are commonly developed over time by several programmers.

Wesley L. Hsu, chief of the cyber and intellectual property crimes section in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, said earlier this summer that investigators were increasingly seeing computer criminals taking over the machines of many victims.

The case was transferred to Wyoming in early July.

The court is not bound by the terms of the plea agreement.

Milmont is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 23 in Casper before Chief U.S. District Judge William Downes.