Suspected Mariposa Botnet Creator Arrested

mehemiah writes "The writer of the Mariposa Botnet has been arrested through international effort. The FBI said this arrest and the arrests of three alleged operators in February were the result of a two-year joint investigation into the Mariposa Botnet, which may have infected as many as eight million to 12 million computers around the world."

Comments

Jail time

[alvinrod]

Send him off to jail. It's his turn to get a lot of unsolicited male in his inbox.

Re:Jail time

[Mongoose Disciple]

It's our odd modern sense of justice. We don't consider incarceration to be an effective deterrent or just punishment, but throw in a little jailhouse rape and suddenly everyone's appropriately scared or satisfied.

People are strange.

Re:Jail time

[Artifakt]

Prison Rape isn't as common as the 'hope you get a cellmate who thinks you have a purty mouth' crowd assumes, but it certainly happens. It's also dumb for the guards or the whole system to allow. First, it's committed by the very violent types, and they don't pick victims because they secretly want to uphold the moral order and those victims are paedophiles or rapists on the outside, they pick them for vulnerability, which means they usually choose the persons with no physical, social or economic power first, not the ones society on the outside thinks are the 'most worthy'. The guy who committed rape on the outside is proven violent, and the cons will seek easier targets, like the kid whose only crime is dealing pot. Second, one way to avoid rape is to get with a gang and do other favors instead. The gangs all split totally along racial lines, all teach criminal methods to new members, and basically steer less violent criminals towards becoming more violent. Tolerating rape helps give gangs another recruitment tool, and empowers the most violent to think they can run the prisons, not the guards. Third, prison rape spreads AIDS, so now you have a growing pool of people who are going to be released in a few years, have become more and more violently inclined, are often hyperinsecure about their masculinity, and are HIV positive. Guards often have female family members too, or other women on the outside they care about. Priming someone to be a threat to them is a bad mistake. The Japanese run some very tough prisons, with almost no instances of rape because they take a prisoner thinking he can get away with more crimes while in prison as an automatic security threat.

Re:Two years?

[asukasoryu]

It's hard enough to find 1 out of 6 billion people in the real world. Harder still to track them in the virtual world through their botnet and relate that back to a physical location where they can be apprehended without causing them to flee. I say kudos and good luck on future captures.

Re:Two years?

[derrickh]

You're an idiot.
The good guys do something good and you sit there and call them inept because they didn't do it in a timeframe you find acceptable? You think that they could just type in 'tracert' and show up at an address to arrest someone? How about congratulating them on bringing in a criminal instead of backseat quarterbacking.

D

Re:Two years?

[mandelbr0t]

It took two years and a task force of how many, costing how much, to bring down three people?

Much less than it would have cost to let them run amok.

That sure says a lot about the state of network security, and law enforcement's ineptitude for technology.

While it says a lot about the state of network security, the fact that 8 to 12 million people were infected with a virus they didn't know about says more about the computer literacy of the average individual. And, despite the fact that the botnet was millions of machines large, providing nearly impenetrable anonymity, law enforcement was still able to find the people behind the whole thing. That is actually one of the rare cases where law enforcement has proven they are not technically inept. Maybe this is a sign of better things to come.

Don't get me wrong. I share your cynicism in general about the state of the Internet and all of the security holes you could pilot a starship through, but I don't think that mocking law enforcement when they actually catch somebody is the way to go. The people behind this botnet were responsible for creating international tensions that could have led to violence. They stole credit cards and banking information with no care for who they were harming, all to fuel their own egotistical ambitions. These were not good people, or hacker heroes, or anything of the sort. Sorry, but I'm siding with the FBI on this one.

And in related news ...

[powerlord]

"The writer of the Mariposa Botnet has been arrested through international effort. The FBI said this arrest and the arrests of three alleged operators in February were the result of a two-year joint investigation into the Mariposa Botnet, which may have infected as many as eight million to 12 million computers around the world."

In related news, a grass roots campaign has started on the net calling for his release.

Current estimates are that anywhere from 8 to 12 million people around the world are current calling for his release, writing petitions to their local government, and spamming on-line petition sites hoping to bring attention to this issue.

Re:Well, thanks goodness...

[Beardo the Bearded]

Life isn't like 24, Law and Order, or Hackers.

First, in order to put someone in jail, you have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they did, in fact, commit the crime. That means you have to have evidence that they actually did the crime, that the don't have an alibi, and have all the evidence admissible in court.

"But my computer was compromised too!" would be a decent defence. How can you get around this? You'd have to track the commands for the botnet and trace each one back to a physical location. You'd then have to prove that whats-his-name was actually at that location at each of those times. Did he use an unsecured wifi hotspot all the time? Did he use his home address? Work? Is there a pattern that points to one individual or group of individuals?

"I don't computer much." So now you have to prove that he's got the skills to actually work the botnet himself, or have the case tossed out or not get to conviction. You'd have to watch the guy actually working. Is he a computer programmer at his day job? Does he have a degree in CS?

It takes a long time to build a solid case. How long did it take for the Unibomber to get to trial? The FBI searched his 10 x 10 shack for six months. What about Robert Pickton? They're still looking through his farm. Things don't get solved in 30 minutes with a pretty bow.

It's just funny

[talmai]

I'm from Slovenia and this year, it seems like we're in the news (and that's big, because we're sooooo small that any little thing about us in foreign media makes us go crazy). First the soccer thing, where we didn't loose to the USA and England, almost ending up in next round and now the biggest botnet seems to be coded here "on the sunny side of Alps". The last part is probably not good publicity but hey, even better, we're bad enough for FBI, how's that for some tiny little country where you can't event sneeze without delivering your germs either to Croatia or Italy.
Slovenians are climaxing right now. Somewhere in between "he [the hacker] should have known better, yet, he's a genius" and "letting FBI take him would mean the end of our sovereignty, our government should employ him".

I'll just sit back and enjoy watching. Comments by fellow citizens who don't know much about computers are just hilarious, I don't know about our national media, it's scary how poor the reporting is.

Re:Two years?

[causality]

Just curious, how would you have gone about finding them? You seem to imply you have a deep understanding of the technology involved.

If it were up to me, I'd harden the targets. Even if that meant making Microsoft financially liable under defective product laws for any losses incurred due to these botnets. The choice for Microsoft would be, stop selling Windows as a general consumer product touting claims of security and ease-of-use or face product liability for its insecurity. If they want to sell Windows as a product designed for skilled/competent users who understand the security issues it would be a different story, but then they'd lose the massive market they currently enjoy. Let them decide whether the product liability or the reduced market is more beneficial to their bottom line. This might have the side-effect of making Windows less of a monopoly, and thus less of a monoculture that allows one exploit to immediately impact millions of machines.

Either way the idea that Joe Sixpack can use an immensely complex system that he doesn't remotely understand and never expect a bad result is an illusion that needs to go. It leads to a parasitic situation where Microsoft profits from Windows and everyone else pays its costs above and beyond its price tag at the point of sale. This is unjust. Doing something about this would be good for everyone except maybe Microsoft, and for that I'd have to quote Spock about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or the one. In the long term, serious pressure on Microsoft to improve Windows might even be beneficial to them as well.

So yes, hardening the targets is the approach I would take. When you have millions of systems with massive vulnerabilities I am not remotely surprised that someone somewhere is going to come along and exploit them. It's rather predictable. You can spend two years and a great deal of effort and expense to catch three of them, but during that two years how many more than three have committed similar crimes? It's a losing game so long as the supply of these criminals exceeds your ability to catch them. That's if your goal is to eliminate botnets. If you have a strong preference for some form of visceral satisfaction, then the current criminal justice approach would be more to your tastes.

It wasn't really my intention to make this a post about Microsoft, but how can you separate them from any sincere discussion about botnets? These million-plus-member botnets might have a great deal of diversity in terms of their function, their method of propagation, their purpose, and who is at the helm. They all have one thing in common: Windows. Targeted attacks by a skilled and determined human adversary are one thing. It's automated self-propagating write-once-exploit-everywhere script-kiddie bullshit for which there is no excuse. It is the latter and not the former that allows for millions of machines to become members of a botnet.

If you're a Microsoft fanboy, Windows is targeted because it's so popular. Because it's so popular and so thoroughly targeted, it needs to be one of the most security-hardened. Call it the price of success. If you're not a Microsoft fanboy, then Windows is targeted because it is inherently less secure. That makes it the squeaky wheel in need of some serious security oil. Either way, it's a pointless debate because what needs to be done about the situation is the same. Because they have such a wealth of resources and talent, I have full confidence that Microsoft could make a Windows secure enough to frustrate automated self-propagating attacks if they truly wanted to do it.