Creators of Massive Botnet Arrested 243
DigitumDei writes "Dutch police has nabbed 3 men (aged 19,22, & 27) who alledgedly used the toxbot trojan to create a botnet of over 100000 machines. The trio conducted a DDOS attack against an unnamed US company in an extortion attempt, as well as using phishing tactics to hijack PayPal and eBay accounts.
From the article: 'Police seized computers, cash, a sports car, and bank accounts at the three men's residences, and additional arrests are expected. The three were to be taken before a magistrate in Breda, a city approximately 25 miles south of Rotterdam, on Friday.
The botnet was dismantled, prosecutors said, with help from the Dutch National High Tech Crime Center; GOVCERT.NL, the Netherlands' Computer Emergency Response Team; and several Internet service providers, including the Amsterdam-based XS4ALL.'"
Re:a botnet of over 100000 machines (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Damn. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:25 miles south of Rotterdam? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:glaring gramatical error (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If only i had my own 100k computer matrix... (Score:3, Informative)
Because bidding on an item calls attention to it. If bidding activity on an item is fierce and heavy, sniping has no benefit. But imagine a situation where you are vying for an item with only one other person. You do not want to set your maximum bid right away, because the other guy's valuation of the item is probably similar to yours -- he'll bid up right away. The other person, of course, follows the same logic and also starts with a lowball bid. Now, since neither party is using automatic bidding, they have to keep checking on the item to see if they've been outbid. What sniping does is allows the other person to become complacent, and not set their actual maximum bid. You can then come in at the last second and bid slightly over them and get the item before they can react.
The reason bidders behave this way is because they are hoping the other guy doesn't know the "true value" of the item. Placing a realistic maximum bid would only drive the price up. But if you are knowledgable of an item's true value and conceal that from the other participants by bidding low at the beginning, you have a better chance of getting the item at a lower price.
Re:Extortion? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who is this XS4ALL? (Score:3, Informative)
This (ad at the bottom of the page) [hacktic.nl] is where XS4ALL started. They were basicly the first public ISP in the Netherlands (tho I am not entirely sure, 'stichting Simplex' was there at around the same time from what I recall)
Demon and XS4ALL definitely have things in common, but I think that has more to do with both having started in the very early days of public internet access, and still believing that they connect computers to a big network (as opposed to the content focus that many an ISP seems to have). Both give you a fixed IP and your own hostname, allow you to run servers including smtp and http etc.
At any rate, XS4ALL grew out of a desire to provide cheap access to the 'live internet' as opposed to the then common uucp mail/news access. The people behind it had been involved in the Datanet 1 (X25 network similar to Tymnet and the like) and the BBS scene, and had been running a somewhat substantial (100+ nodes) uucp network for some time. They went for nothing less making it possible for every person with the proper equipment to become a full host on the Internet, an attitude which is still pretty much there in modern XS4ALL.
AH well.. thanks for reminding me of that time.. had fun looking up some info on it today, and reading back about the early days of Internet access overhere. Heh, to think that I have a nice 8mbit up/1 mbit down connection here that costs about 1/5th per month when compared to the initial internet connection (at a whopping 19k2) that XS4ALL used themselves to get on the net
I did not use XS4ALL much during those early days, mostly because I got a free account from IGN with which I had internet access with local dialin from about any major city worldwide, and I had a rather good access deal with Simplex for my home network. I can confirm your comments about the quality of XS4ALL and their generally nice attitude towards issues that concern their private customers.