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

Important to point out...

[kaos07]

I think it's important to point out that the kid 'Akill' was released without charge and that he didn't make any money out of the operation. Some sources are reporting that the group "raked in" $20 million, whereas that figure comes from estimates of "economic losses" so are probably inflated or meaningless depending on where the sources come from.

Re:Important to point out...

[fireboy1919]

that figure comes from estimates of "economic losses" so are probably inflated or meaningless depending on where the sources come from.

What would be realistic? Lets say that he stole the use of 100,000 computers in his botnet. At 2Mil, each computer would have $20 in economic losses.

That doesn't seem at all unrealistic. If it costs $20 of your time (i.e., if it takes an hour to clean and you make $20 an hour, or something to that effect), then it's $20 in economic loss. If the resulting slowdown costs $20 of your productive time, same thing.

Sure, some people don't lose that much by not being productive, but some lose a lot more. $20 average sounds entirely reasonable - probably a little low, actually. They probably didn't infect that many machines.

Keep in mind that I'm not even bringing up what is done with those computers - I'm just talking about losses caused by putting the spyware on machines, and haven't begun to talk about what is done with it.
If bad things were done with things, it would certainly drive the average cost per infection up a lot, which would make it easy to cause that much damage while infecting far fewer machines.

Point is that this isn't like assuming that every download=a sale lost. It isn't outside the realm of possibility at all.

Re:Important to point out...

[BiggerIsBetter]

I think it's important to point out that the kid 'Akill' was released without charge and that he didn't make any money out of the operation. Some sources are reporting that the group "raked in" $20 million, whereas that figure comes from estimates of "economic losses" so are probably inflated or meaningless depending on where the sources come from. Linkage

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.

Yoohoo!!!

[courteaudotbiz]

We finally won't have to deal with malware anymore! The guy has been arrested!

Re:Yoohoo!!!

[flyingsquid]

We finally won't have to deal with malware anymore! The guy has been arrested!

When a farmer wants to get rid of the coyotes, he doesn't shoot them all. He shoots one. Just one. And then leaves it there to rot in his field. Coyotes are pretty smart- they see the dead coyote, realize going on his farm isn't a safe thing to do, and he's often good for the rest of the year.

Re:Yoohoo!!!

[m4ximusprim3]

so you're saying we should kill him and shove his body into the tubes?

Doesn't sound right to me

[Silver Sloth]

The teenager cannot be named for legal reasons, but uses the online identity "Akill". He was later released without charge, but police said they expected to interview him again. and then

The teenager was the "head of an international spybot ring that has infiltrated computers around the world with their malicious software", Kleintjes told New Zealand national radio. and then

Kleintjes said the teenager had written software that evaded normal computer spyware systems, then sold his skills to hackers. "He is very bright and very skilled in what he's doing," Kleintjes said. "He hires his services out to others." It looks to me like some script kiddie is being puffed up as 'Head of an internationa spybot ring'. I'm not saying he's innocent but there's a lot of spin in this.

Re:They hate competition

[Nextraztus]

And hence, this perpetrator will get the good cop/bad cop/job recruitment officer.

Cut the head off?

[Caption Wierd]

When the "mastermind" is arrested, does a botnet die or continue some sort of pointless frankenstenian existence?

Re:Cut the head off?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

When the "mastermind" is arrested, does a botnet die or continue some sort of pointless frankenstenian existence?

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

This kid is a scapegoat...

[8127972]

... as he likely did this using stuff found on the Internet for giggles. Perhaps the authorities should focus on the real spybot ringleaders out there. You know the ones that work for organized crime and cause untold amounts of damage? Those are the ones we should worry about.

Re:This kid is a scapegoat...

[Billosaur]

No, the kid is eye candy for law enforcement... he does the perp walk so that they can be seen to be doing something about the problem.

I could be worse....

[iknownuttin]

if it were the RI/MPAA, it would have said 20 billion.

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.

Link to article about US student arrested

[DarthTeufel]

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_stories/11910042.html A Penn student who was arrested in connection with AKILL

infected computers ..

[rs232]

"The FBI estimates that more than 1m computers have been infected"

What Operating System did these computers run on and is it possible to make a 'computer' that don't get infected by clicking on a URL or opening an attachment.

and then

[darthflo]

and then

The teenager is said to have infiltrated top secret government networks throughout the universe. "He created both Linux and Windows in the lunch breaks of his freshman year in college and plans to take over control of the world after finishing his PhD next year", Kleintjes said.

I, for one, ph34r our new NZ script kiddie overlords.

Re:They hate competition

[Rob the Bold]

"FBI" is singular, not plural.

The Queen's English seems to mandate the use of the plural when referring to ourganizatiouns. Kind ouf like the extra 'U's in wourds like "Coummounwealth".

Re:They hate competition

[Heian-794]

You people annoy me sometimes; "The FBI are purging all tha data that is...." AARGH!!!!! I need more coffee...

Hopefully you import your coffee from Colombia or somewhere other than the UK where plural verbs are used routinely for organizations in this sense. 'Manchester United are wankers' and the like. The closest thing I can think of in the US is sports teams with those silly-sounding singular mass-noun nicknames like the Tampa Bay Lightning. "The Utah Jazz haven't been the same without Karl Malone"; "The Minnesota Wild are winning again", etc.

[/multinational inclusivist grammar nazi]

Except you're wrong

[nunyadambinness]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

confusion often stems from the fact that plural verb forms can often be used with the singular forms of these count nouns (for example: "The team have finished the project"); and, conversely, singular verb forms can often be used with nouns ending in "-s" that were once considered plural (for example: "Physics is my favorite academic subject"). This apparent "number mismatch" is actually a quite natural and logical feature of human language, and its mechanism is a subtle metonymic shift in the thoughts underlying the words.

AARGH!!!!! I need more coffee...

No, you need more education.

Is everyone missing the real point?

[Brickwall]

This kid created malware. He is obviously (at 10??) bright enough to understand what malware can do. He didn't choose to notify banks, credit card firms, etc., that they were subject to his attacks; instead, if I RTFA correctly, he chose to sell this method to criminals.

I have two daughters, 10 and 13, who seem to have no compunctions about releasing all their personal data on Facebook and Myspace. I keep telling them security is important, and they shouldn't be releasing their full names, school, pets, etc., as those are usually part of passwords. I'm not sure they listen. I'm also sure that's because they have no idea of the stakes involved. We keep the value of their trust funds secret, but the two are worth over $300k today, and we are budgeting $500k for their education in the future. If this NZ kid's exploits prevented either one of my daughters from attending the school of their choose, I'd want to make him pretty pay dearly.

My suggestion: put him in jail for a few months (not years); then he might realize his freedom is worth more to him than other people's money.

Re:Like I said...

[The Great Pretender]

Lets ignore Wikipedia for the moment, although I understand it is an exemplary reference for everything and look at an editors text book "Sabin, William A. The Gregg Reference Manual. 8th Edition. Macmilliam/McGraw Hill. NY: 1992.", where you will find that "Rule: Use a singular verb for a collective noun when the group is acting as a unit" (Section 1019).

Saying all this you may want to contact the University of Texas, Austin Department of Chemical Engineering and tell them to modify its comments in its communication instruction http://http//www.engr.utexas.edu/che/techwriting/morehelp/grammar.cfm. Likewise the University of Iowas Creative Writing program would also disagree with you, but I don't have an elink to my hard copied notes. There's some more US educational institutions I can point you to, but I'm sure they're not as reliable as Wikipedia.