CNN/Reuters: FBI agents bust 'Botmaster'

[DeepModem Mom]

FBI agents bust 'Botmaster'
Friday, November 4, 2005


LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- A 20-year-old man accused of using thousands of hijacked computers, or "bot nets," to damage systems and send massive amounts of spam across the Internet was arrested on Thursday in what authorities called the first such prosecution of its kind.

Jeanson James Ancheta, who prosecutors say was a well-known member of the "Botmaster Underground" -- or the secret network of computer hackers skilled at bot attacks -- was taken into custody after being lured to FBI offices in Los Angeles, said U.S. Attorney's spokesman Thom Mrozek.

A bot is a program that surreptitiously installs itself on a computer and allows the hacker to control the computer. A bot net is a network of such robot computers, which can harness their collective power to do considerable damage or send out huge quantities of spam.

Mrozek said the prosecution was unique because, unlike in previous cases, Ancheta was accused of profiting from his attacks -- by selling access to his "bot nets" to other hackers and planting adware -- software that causes ads to pop up -- into infected computers.

"Normally what we see in these cases, where people set up these bot systems to do, say, denial of service attacks, they are not doing it for profit, they are doing it for bragging rights," he said. "This is the first case in the nation that we're aware of where the guy was using various bot nets in order to make money for himself."...


http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/11/04/crime.botmaster.reut/index.html

[twaddler01]

1. GOOD

[babylonsister]

2. I second that. nt

[William769]

3. Good!

[Imagevision]

4. They need to send one of these pests away instead of employing them

[Halliburton]

5. good

[xchrom]

6. excellent!

[NVMojo]

7. is this the same as "web-bots?"

[NCPatriot]

8. Clarify...

Web Bots, Spider Bots... or just plain Bots for that matter, when referring to the web are generally used in terms of SEO. (Search engine optimization).

A Web/spider bot (Googlebot for instance) will commonly find a link on a website and follow that link to its destination.

This is how most websites are initially located by search engines.

There are other forms such as emailbots, which will follow a link (like a regular bot) and scan all of the email addresses off a page, reporting back to the bot server the newly found spam victims!

Well... Thats a-bot all I have to say a-bot that!

[Thangalin]

9. Never Write Software Again!

Oh my,

Mister Ro'bot'o slammed. Nice job!

[maddezmom]

10. locking

duplicate topic
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1899545