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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."
At just .15 per bot, this confirms that the economic downturn has affected the bot trade as well.
No stimulus package in sight. I'm holding on to my bots till the rebound.
What's to stop him from leasing use of the botnet to multiple cyber-criminals now that he's built it up? I mean, the initial sale is just a little bit, but suppose the market for the botnet is more than just one organization, or suppose he charges by the day?
I'm not really a professional botnet organizer, so I have no idea how plausible this is.
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.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
22000 machines, if each one got the mission done. There will be 22000 infected machines. If the guy is sentenced
for 1 day each. He will be away for over 60 years.
Have you grown up yet?
It's not exactly rocket science for either of them. For the target, you need to look at logs. For the zombies, you need to look for the bot software. Hell, if they've cracked the control software for the bot network (which it sounds like they have), it's a hell of a lot easier to gather evidence for the zombies.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face