Creators of Massive Botnet Arrested

DigitumDei writes "Dutch police has nabbed 3 men (aged 19,22, & 27) who alledgedly used the toxbot trojan to create a botnet of over 100000 machines. The trio conducted a DDOS attack against an unnamed US company in an extortion attempt, as well as using phishing tactics to hijack PayPal and eBay accounts. From the article: 'Police seized computers, cash, a sports car, and bank accounts at the three men's residences, and additional arrests are expected. The three were to be taken before a magistrate in Breda, a city approximately 25 miles south of Rotterdam, on Friday. The botnet was dismantled, prosecutors said, with help from the Dutch National High Tech Crime Center; GOVCERT.NL, the Netherlands' Computer Emergency Response Team; and several Internet service providers, including the Amsterdam-based XS4ALL.'"

Comments

Good!

[RedNovember]

I'm happy these guys were arrested. Things like this scare companies and people away from technology. Not to imply that modern companies will survive without computers, but will your boss think long and hard before approving tech budgets? You bet. I've never heard of a bunch of crackers extorting a company.

This will also give them pause when hiring former hackers. They might think "Is this guy going to give extortionists inside info?"

On the other hand, security folks may have a budget windfall thrown their way. Considering '"Each time the Trojan was stopped by anti-virus defenses, they made a new version," he said. "This was not just a one-off. The sheer number of variants shows this wasn't a crime they committed just once."' Those security people better get to it.

Re:Good, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, just like the marijuana laws on the books (forced by other countries), it's public policy not to enforce things that are considered a waste of law enforcements time.

The government said themselves that making file sharing a criminal offence just turns a large portion of the population into criminals for no real benefit. This is similar to the drugs policy. From Wikipedia:

However, a policy of non-enforcement has led to a situation where reliance upon non-enforcement has become common, and because of this the courts have ruled against the government when individual cases were prosecuted.

This is because the Dutch Ministry of Justice applies a gedoogbeleid (policy of tolerance) with regard to soft drugs: an official set of guidelines telling public prosecutors under which circumstances offenders should not be prosecuted. This is a more official version of the common practice in other countries, in which law enforcement sets priorities as to which offenses are important enough to spend limited resources on.

Proponents of gedoogbeleid argue that such a policy offers more consistency in legal protection in practice, than without it. Opponents of the Dutch drug policy either call for full legalization, or argue that laws should penalize morally wrong or decadent behavior, whether this is enforceable or not.

So no, the government tends to go after real criminals, rather than waste time on teenagers with too much free time.