Texas Man Pleads Guilty To Building Botnet-For-Hire 95
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the best-little-botnet-in-Texas dept.
from the best-little-botnet-in-Texas dept.
Julie188 writes "A Mesquite, Texas, man is set to plead guilty to training his 22,000-PC botnet on a local ISP — just to show off its firepower to a potential customer. David Anthony Edwards will plead guilty to charges that he and another man, Thomas James Frederick Smith, built a custom botnet, called Nettick, which they then tried to sell to cybercriminals at the rate of US$0.15 per infected computer, according to court documents."
Re:$3300.00 (Score:4, Informative)
It's fairly easy.
You need:
1. A controlling server. Preferably located in some country ending in -stan or some other country where law enforcement laughs at interpol when they ask for aid.
2. An infector and sheepifyer trojan. Trivial to code.
3. A few million sheep. For pointers, see facebook&twitter.
Additionally it is wise to create your trojan in such a way that you (and only you) can update it and redirect it to some other control server should yours get shut down for some odd reason. Make sure that you create a good enough challenge/response or be prepared for someone else to harvest your infections.
Re:$0.15? (Score:2, Informative)
$0.15 == 15 cents.
You need to carry the one...
Re:Counts (Score:4, Informative)
You misunderstood. He used the botnet to attack one ISP, the PCs could be anywhere.
Re:Counts (Score:5, Informative)
It's not exactly rocket science for either of them. For the target, you need to look at logs. For the zombies, you need to look for the bot software. Hell, if they've cracked the control software for the bot network (which it sounds like they have), it's a hell of a lot easier to gather evidence for the zombies.
Re:Counts (Score:3, Informative)
Concurrent sentencing prevents sending you to jail for 300 years for parking tickets.