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Arizona Botnet Controller Draws 30-Month Federal Sentence
dgharmon writes with word from the BBC that "A U.S. hacker who sold access to thousands of hijacked home computers has been jailed for 30 months. Joshua Schichtel of Phoenix, Arizona, was sentenced for renting out more than 72,000 PCs that he had taken over using computer viruses." Time is cheap: Schichtel admitted to giving access to those 72,000 computers for $1500.
Should have incorporated his criminal enterprise into a bank. Then he wouldn't serve any time and the government would bail him out for business expenses. It's rather silly to commit individual crime when corporate crime pays more and there's usually no time served.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Just considering the personal information that could be stored on those machines and possibly accessed by someone with the intent of ID theft. It should have been a month for each machine compromised.
Playing devil's advocate but he did not access the personal information, he provided access. Should an ISP be liable for their customer's actions?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
There is a demand for distributed computing. A general purpose SETI@home w/ internet access. If only the operating systems were secure enough to allow individuals to join such a network and give arbitrary control to strangers they could earn a small profit by selling some amount of their unused bandwidth and CPU power. We could actually monetize all our idle CPUs and unreached bandwidth caps. A more sandboxed solution -- like the aforementioned SETI or Folding@Home, etc -- could be marketed by legitimate businesses. It seems a logical conclusion given our need for always on home (media/status) servers to stream our digital properties to us, and the success of "cloud computing".
Unfortunately the law is also not on our side: What if a client uses your Cloud@Home 'server' to download and redistribute "illegal" material? (The same as if a bot-net operator directs your machine to do so today.) We need to address the issue of identity (IPaddr != person) if my distributed machine intelligence system is ever to make the Internet self aware... So long as we would pay it enough to solve hard problems it could pay for it's own distributed computing rent.
With the state of computer security being utterly insecure at nearly every juncture, and our unwillingness to fix the legal risk of us meeting the demand for affordable distributed computing, I think it's only natural that such is done illegally. Do you really want the first global sentient machine intelligence to be a rogue bot-net system? That will surely escalate to (cyber) war. I'd much rather have it be a peaceful, profitable and legal entity. Sadly we'll have the lawyers and lawmakers to blame for bringing about the first man vs machine war.
I could have posted this to the freedom of speach vs child porn story as well.
Pick the oldest woman infected. Give her a CD of her OS and all the programs she had installed. Tell her to install it to where it's back to where it was. Time her. Sentence him to that time times all the people affected.
Learn to love Alaska
Unauthorized access of a computer is a felony. (Doing that for the purpose of selling someone else access like that is probably an additional felony, it looks roughly like conspiracy to me. But let's ignore that.) That is, every single authorized access is a felony.
This guy got 30 months for committing 72000 felonies?
I know jail time doesn't necessarily 'stack', and that unauthorized computer access is one of the lower-class of felonies, and probably supposed to only be a year in jail at most.
But, still, this is completely absurd. That sentence is 18 minutes per felony.
Malware and computer hijacking, is basically the legal equivalent of carpeting a football stadium of people with tear gas. If you did that, you'd be charged with tens of thousands of instances of basic assault (A crime which is roughly in the same ballpark, legally, as unauthorized computer access.) and end up in jail almost forever.
But somehow unauthorized computer access, despite being something that each individual instance is supposed to result in (at least) months in jail, and which does result in months in jail when it's against the wrong person, aka, a big corporation...somehow all that just goes away if you do it against enough people at once via malware.
If I invented a robot that went around stealing from 72000 stores, they wouldn't just laugh and give me the equivalent of five counts of shoplifting in jail time. If I kill twenty people at once, they don't just laugh and say 'Oh, that was really just one instance, let's sentence him for, oh, two murders, that seems fair.'
72000 felonies.
And let's not forget, these have actual victims. Here's a fun question: Would you rather be punched in the face once (Basic assault), or have to reinstall your entire computer? (And, as only 25% of the population has any sort of backup at all, let's pretend you'd lose 75% of your stuff.)
Yeah, I thought so. There's a reason we actually made the law the way we made it, where those two are within the same order of magnitude as crimes. The courts, OTOH, seem to think that some guy hacking a computer server of a powerful company (Which is one computer and hence one felony.) is much much worse than someone hijacking 72000 human-owned computers.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?