Operation Bot Roast - Hacker Faces 65 Years in Jail
Terry Trippany on Jun 14 2007 at 1:01 pm | Filed under: Linkfest, Technology
This is the most welcome news I have seen in years on the spam front. The FBI announced the results of a massive initiative to shut down botherders who take over unsuspecting personal computers and servers for use in various hacking activities such as ID theft, phishing and spamming.
Today the Department of Justice and FBI announced the results of an ongoing cyber crime initiative to disrupt and dismantle “botherders” and elevate the public’s cyber security awareness of botnets. OPERATION BOT ROAST is a national initiative and ongoing investigations have identified over 1 million victim computer IP addresses. The FBI is working with our industry partners, including the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity.
A botnet is a collection of compromised computers under the remote command and control of a criminal “botherder.” Most owners of the compromised computers are unknowing and unwitting victims. They have unintentionally allowed unauthorized access and use of their computers as a vehicle to facilitate other crimes, such as identity theft, denial of service attacks, phishing, click fraud, and the mass distribution of spam and spyware. Because of their widely distributed capabilities, botnets are a growing threat to national security, the national information infrastructure, and the economy.
“The majority of victims are not even aware that their computer has been compromised or their personal information exploited,” said FBI Assistant Director for the Cyber Division James Finch. “An attacker gains control by infecting the computer with a virus or other malicious code and the computer continues to operate normally. Citizens can protect themselves from botnets and the associated schemes by practicing strong computer security habits to reduce the risk that your computer will be compromised.”
One particular scumbag (alleged),Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Ky. has been charged with running a botnet responsible for flooding unsuspecting networks with denial of service attacks. According to Symantec and Trend Micro Downey was also the administrator of the Yotta-Byte.net server. This particular server was the alleged source of a nasty variant of the Agobot worm. The worm exploited vulnerable computers to disable anti-virus mechanisms and then run various commands on the remote computer. It also sent out ID information and stolen software keys which were then put on an underground network where the information was sold in a computerized black market.
Wired magazine has a copy of the criminal complaint against Downey.
The Washington Post is reporting that the other botherders were equally as scummy.
The government named three individuals it has arrested or charged in connection with the investigation, one of whom was long-time spam king Robert Soloway. The FBI charged James Brewer of Arlington, Tex., with running a botnet of “tens of thousands of computers,” at least some of which were located in Chicago-area hospitals.
Soloway is alleged to be one of the worlds biggest spammers. He was arrested and charged with over 35 counts of fraud, theft and money laundering.
Soloway, 27, used his empire of hijacked “zombie” computers to send tens of millions of unsolicited e-mail messages over the past four years, prosecutors allege. Described as a spammer since he was a teenager, he allegedly covered his digital tracks using Chinese servers, fabricated Web sites and the purloined identities of hundreds of Internet users whose names and e-mail addresses were slapped on the bulk mailings. He opened and closed bank accounts faster than creditors could track them, prosecutors said.
Junk e-mail is most often distributed through the use of mass e-mailing programs and networks of computers infected by viruses, according to computer security experts.
But federal authorities caught up this week with the man prosecutors call the “spam king” and arrested him on 35 charges of fraud, identity theft and money laundering, casting a light on the byzantine, highly lucrative underworld of mass e-mail marketing. Soloway pleaded not guilty.
“He is one of the bad ones. He’s one of the longest-running and uses criminal methods all the time,” said John Reid, an investigator with Spamhaus, a European organization that fights spam. “Anyone on the Web for a while would have received one of Soloway’s spams.”
Let’s hope they lock him up and lose the key.
Microsoft worked along the FBI in the operation. This of course stems from the fact that a majority of machines taken over by bots are in the Microsoft family.
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Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, stikNstein… has no mercy, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, The Pet Haven Blog, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Conservative Cat, and High Desert Wanderer, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
OPERATION BOT ROAST, Jason Michael Downey, botherder, Robert Soloway, FBI, James Brewer, bot, Microsoft
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