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Alleged BotMaster Busted
Chris Crum
Staff Writer
2005-11-04
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
20-year old Jeanson James Ancheta, who allegedly hijacked thousands of computers, was arrested after the FBI got him to their offices in Los Angeles.
Included in these computers were some at the Weapons Division of the US Naval Air Warfare Center, and the U.S. Department of Defense. That is a pretty serious crime.
They are saying that Ancheta faces up to 50 years in prison if found guilty of the crimes, which also include: conspiracy, attempted code transmission to a protected computer and a government computer, money laundering, and fraud.
The hijacked computers are called "bot nets", and Ancheta allegedly used them to inflict damage on servers as well as send mass spam all over the Internet. According to news24.com,
Ancheta allegedly wrote and spread a malicious code known as a Trojan horse, which caused the computers to become part of the bot network without the knowledge or consent of their owners.
The botnets, each with thousands of internet-connected computers, then reported to an Internet Relay Chat channel Ancheta controlled, prosecutors allege.
"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," said U.S. Attorney's spokesman Thom Mrozek. "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."
Ancheta is thought to have made close to $60,000 from his attacks, which he used a good portion of to buy equipment so he could initiate further attacks.
About the Author:
Chris Crum is a staff writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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