Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NZ Teen Arrested as 'Spybot Mastermind'

Posted by Zonk on from the i-was-nowhere-near-this-hard-working-as-a-teen dept.

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."

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Important to point out... by kaos07 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Important to point out... by fireboy1919 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
  2. Re:Yoohoo!!! by m4ximusprim3 · · Score: 5, Funny

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