Dutch Authorities Bag a BotNet of 1.5 Million Compromised Computers
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkMonday, October 24, 2005
Dutch prosecutors last month arrested three young men for creating and operating a botnet allegedly used to extort a U.S. company, to steal PayPal and eBay accounts, and to install adware and spyware.
It turned out that the botnet was comprised of a staggering 1.5 million computers.
The three suspects, aged 19, 22, and 27, were arrested on charges of threatening a U.S. firm with a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. They used phishing tactics to hijack PayPal and eBay accounts, then used them to pay for goods ordered on the Internet.
They also may have written viruses for others, who paid the hackers to come up with tools for stealing online bank account usernames and passwords.
The two younger men (19 year old being the leader) are still in custody but the 27-year-old has been released pending trial.
They supposedly used the Toxbot/Codbot Trojan horse to infect the machines.
I wonder how many such botnets are still in existence. Botnets already made IP banning totally useless as a spam prevention tool.
ilahi dinle