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Los Angeles Virus Spreader Gets Inoculated
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-11-09
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A Los Angeles man is being held without bond after being charged with spreading electronic viruses in order to get control over computers, mainly military and sell the access to spammers, hackers and other cyber criminal types.
Jeanson James Ancheta, 20, was arrested last week and pleaded not guilty on the 17-count federal indictment. Charges include transmission of code to a government computer, accessing a protected computer to commit fraud and the ever-popular conspiracy and money laundering charges. Money laundering carries some pretty stiff time. He could see over 50 years if he's nailed on everything.
The 17-count indictment alleges that Ancheta wrote malicious computer code, spread that code to assemble armies of infected computers, and sold access to the infected computers for the purpose of launching distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and sending spam. Ancheta also allegedly used the botnets to generate income from the surreptitious installation of adware on the infected computers.
This operation was an organized crime style operation. According to the indictment, Ancheta disseminated a Trojan horse program to create botnets. Then he would monitor all that through Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The FBI also charged he would actively try and sell his botnet to those who might need it for a denial service attack.
Prosecutors say he attracted their attention when he hacked into the Defense Information Systems Agency and the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake.
They're also going after his stuff including $60,000 in cash, a BMW and computer equipment where they think he did the deeds.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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