Texas Man Pleads Guilty To Building Botnet-For-Hire

Julie188 writes "A Mesquite, Texas, man is set to plead guilty to training his 22,000-PC botnet on a local ISP — just to show off its firepower to a potential customer. David Anthony Edwards will plead guilty to charges that he and another man, Thomas James Frederick Smith, built a custom botnet, called Nettick, which they then tried to sell to cybercriminals at the rate of US$0.15 per infected computer, according to court documents."

Comments

$0.15 Per?

[grcumb]

Thomas James Frederick Smith, built a custom botnet, called Nettick, which they then tried to sell to cybercriminals at the rate of US$0.15 per infected computer....

That's, like, US $3300 for the lot. He's not going to get much hookers and blow outta that.

If he did any programming at all to develop the exploit, then his wages are in the basement. (Probably right next to his 'office'.) Once you factor in the time it would have taken to propagate, test and market the botnet, this guy stood to earning the merest pittance.

Then again, he was stupid enough to turn the thing on his own ISP, so we shouldn't marvel too much over his lack of business acumen.

Ah they broke rule #1 of cybercrime

[CrazyJim1]

Don't perform cybercrime in the borders of the USA.

Re:Counts

[LordLucless]

So the one count they're charged with is for invading a corporate computer. And the thousands of individual citizens' PCs they compromised are ignored. Somehow, I'm not surprised.