NZ Teen Arrested as 'Spybot Mastermind'

Josh Fink writes "The Guardian has an interesting piece on 'Akill', a teenager from New Zealand who was the ringleader of a hacking ring. The economic impact of the ring may have totaled £9.7m. 'The teenager was the "head of an international spybot ring that has infiltrated computers around the world with their malicious software', Martin Kleintjes told New Zealand national radio ... The FBI estimates that more than 1m computers have been infected, and puts the combined economic losses at more than $20m (£9.7m).' Eight people have been charged, pleaded guilty or have been convicted since June. The FBI really has been putting a crackdown on botnets / spyware recently."

Comments

Re:Important to point out...

[Firethorn]

This is, of course, just as arbitrary as any other metric and most notably does not measure anything which can be reasonably termed "loss".

I get mad at you and hit you a few times with a baseball bat, rendering you unable to work for two weeks. Are you trying to say that when you haul me into court you wouldn't be suing for lost wages?

Those agents could have been going after somebody else, the IT guys could have been catching up on their research, pushing patches, not worked as much overtime, or gotten by with 2 security guys.

Consider that many large businesses have losses in the millions per hour of system downtime. So a single successful DoS against one of them would add cost on real fast.

You're simply making up what you imagine to be his activities, and then making up figures to assign to that.

Looks like he was, at least a bit - part of the losses quoted in the article aparently deal with funds stolen from bank acounts, in the millions of pounds. So it could be that the £9.7M figure comes from what they currently figure was stolen. On the other hand, it wasn't 100k computers compromised, it was 'more than 1.3 Million'. That's only about £7.5 per computer, or ~ $15USD. Not going to get much cleaning done at that price.

If anything, I'd say that the 9.7M figure is probably low, only including the monetary thefts.

Re:I could be worse....

[billcopc]

*sprays water on mods* Bad mod, no donut!

This should be rated "+1 Sad but True"

I actually find the 20 mil number quite conservative. 20$ per zombie is low, a bot using up 100% CPU eats up a lot of electricity, causes extra thermal stress on the components (thus more failures), and a heck of a lot of wasted money on cleaning the thing out, especially when the Geek Squad is involved.