Botnet Spammer Gets Just 18 Months For Being Odd 83
itwbennett writes "Thirty-three-year old Scottsman Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006. The reason for his relatively light sentence? He apparently wasn't seeking to maximize profit like any normal, red-blooded hacker. Also, his timing was good. His arrest in June 2006 predated by a matter of months the Police and Justice Act, which would likely have resulted in a harsher sentence. By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison."
Aye, tis true (Score:5, Funny)
There's nary a court in the world that can outsmart a greased Scotsman!
Jeepers! (Score:1, Funny)
Spammer Gets Just 18 Months For Being Odd
In Scotland, you can go to jail for being odd?
I guess an odd Scotsman would be one who doesn't wear a skirt, throw telephone poles for no particular reason, pick drunken fights with cows and trees or eat stuff that most people would rather throw away.
Not quite. (Score:5, Funny)
What you've described is a normal Scotsman. An odd Scotsman wouldn't wear anything below the waist at all-not even trousers, be on the receiving end of a tossed telephone pole for no particular reason, deliver Glaswegian kisses to cows and trees while sober, and not only would refuse to eat anything that didn't already have sheep, potatoes, turnips, or sod in it, he'd also refrain from alcohol in all its forms. Nor would he know how to play golf.
In retrospect, it's probably the total abstainment from alcohol that would mark a Scotsman as being 'odd'. Everything else would probably get overlooked or forgiven.
Re: (Score:2)
and not only would refuse to eat anything that didn't already have sheep, potatoes, turnips, or sod in it,
Cooks Source has now declared your recipe for Haggis to be "public domain," since you posted it on the Internet tubes.
he'd also refrain from alcohol in all its forms.
Alcohol is the most important ingredient in Scottish cooking. If you get enough of that before dinner; preferably from Islay, like Laguvalin or Bowmore, you won't give a damn how the food tastes.
DISCLAIMER: On my mother's side, both grandparents were from Scotland. Grandma (Nana) from Aberdeen, and Grandpa from Dundee. Relatives in Scotland sent me comics from Oor Wullie, The Broons a
Re: (Score:2)
There's nary a court in the world that can outsmart a greased Scotsman!
Did he put hot stuff on the Trojan?
18 months light "by comparison?" (Score:5, Insightful)
How long does a year last in your world?
Re:18 months light "by comparison?" (Score:5, Informative)
18 months as punishment for creating and operating a botnet for profit? Taking control of thousands of other peoples property.
VS
1 year for guessing a publicly available password reset question/answer on a published email address and then publishing the password and doing no real damage except to expose a politicians improper use of private email channels for to violate public transparency laws.
Yes, the first is a very light sentence in comparison to the second considering the crime involved.
Re:18 months light "by comparison?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
doing no real damage except to expose a politicians improper use of private email channels for to violate public transparency laws.
Nice revisionist history there. Palin didn't use this e-mail for state business. The hacker was the son of a Democrat congressman, so he had an incentive to find anything possibly incriminating, and there wasn't anything. Others have speculated that she used a different e-mail, but that was only after they didn't find any dirt in this one. But thanks for spreading the lie.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please.
No, it's 1 year for breaking into the potential vice president's account then trying to get rid of the evidence that he'd done so. Don't try and dress it up as a Noble crusader who loved his country being harshly imprisoned f
Re: (Score:2)
Re:18 months light "by comparison?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Tax payer expenses (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hey now, it's Scotland, so use Scottish currency.
The equivalent is 2 healthy sheep and a bolt of Tartan cloth.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
... perhaps they need to get laid more often.
There is spam for that!
Re: (Score:2)
I know it's bad manners to reply to your own post, but since my original post is rated flamebait even though it was meant completely seriously I'd really like to know now from someone here why people hate spam so much. I'm getting perhaps 20-100 spam mails a day and never had any problems with them, they are filtered out very neatly by my spam filter. Some of these mails are even funny and the viruses they contain never work on my old Mac or on my linux box. That people can go to prison for sending spam is
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it bother you when a stoplight is red for 30 seconds longer than it should be? It only costs you a few seconds of time, and a few drops of gas, each commute...
Re: (Score:2)
On the main theme, what puzzles me is that lot's of people still don't get two things: 1. 8 out of 10 people you meet are smarter than you.
Re: (Score:1)
So with that in mind, spammers do actually do a fair amount of damage. It's not just bandwidth being chewed - it's the theft of other people's property to send their spam, which in turn gets other people's mail servers blacklisted (like ISPs
Re: (Score:2)
Only about 3-5% of email worldwide traffic is not spam. This is a huge waste of resources.
Anderson's not weird. He's you (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a look at his crimes without the veil of judgment. He did some pretty neato stuff.
He found a way to run his code on a huge number of computers without the owners knowing at all.
He learned how to control the PC cameras of those computers and had "eyes" everywhere.
He ran this all from his mom's tiny little living room.
He's a modern-day phracker. He's doing stuff that is way out there, taking over peoples' PCs, controlling their systems, and he did it all for the love of technology. If he was alive 30 years ago, he'd have been whistling into the handset receivers of payphones to get free long distance from Ma Bell.
Yes, we need to condemn him because he crossed the line. Genius should be tempered with good sense, and it looks like he got carried away with what he *could* do and didn't contemplate hard enough on what he *shouldn't* do. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. His heart is in the right place. What he needs is better guidance.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Imagine a person building a barn without locks, someone sneaks in and starts a terrorist group there. Are the people that provided him with the material to build a barn responsible for the terrorist group?
Don't get me wrong I do think M$ should do something about it, but the spammer is the largest culpr
Re: (Score:1)
don't get me wrong, i believe everyone reads every license placed in front of them while turning on the computer they just purchased for the first time.
disclaimer: no one cares how or why you utilize technology.
Re: (Score:1)
why do you cower? what are you afraid of?
you're completely pathetic.
Re: (Score:1)
you're an idiot.
why do you cower? what are you afraid of?
you are less than pathetic. you are NOTHING.
Re:Anderson's not weird. He's you (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, it's a word.
Phrackers even have their own publication [phrack.org]. Nice to see Phrack is still going strong just like 2600.
Re:Anderson's not weird. He's you (Score:5, Insightful)
Shweet jumped up jebus.
His heart was not in the right place. He ran a botnet distributing malware. Malware for data theft. Surveillance on people using infected PCs. Infected by him. He knew precisely what he was doing.
But yes...lets glorify the poor, misunderstood dude working in his mom's living room.
'neato stuff' indeed. YGBSM. You know...there are ways to learn how to do that without abusing innocent civilians.
"Crossed the line" is an understatement. And this gets modded up, or recommended for a job.
Re: (Score:2)
Now there you go being all judgmental.
If your heart was in the right place, you wouldn't so rudely intrude with reality.
That's because many on Slashdot are strange (Score:5, Insightful)
They have this view that, when it comes to computers, if they CAN do something, as in it is technically possible for them to do it, that makes it ok to do and means it ought to be legal. Breaking in to a system that has a weak password or lacks a security fix is fine in their view because that person is "stupid" and "deserves it". Of course none of them would be ok with someone breaking in to their house, even though like basically everyone they live in houses with known security vulnerabilities.
Hence why they are ok with a guy like this. They are ok with someone who breaks in to others' systems and abuses them because their ego says that only stupid people can be victims and the victims deserve it.
It is a sadly common view on this site.
Re: (Score:2)
Take a look at his crimes without the veil of judgment. He did some pretty neato stuff.
He found a way to run his code on a huge number of computers without the owners knowing at all.
No, he just used the existing Microsoft "API" for doing all this.
Re: (Score:2)
You know that setting up a rootkit is only about 1 step up from Script Kiddie, right?
Download a crack for any Adobe CS product.
Write an app that opens a port and listens, taking in strings and running them through at the console, so like a hidden command prompt.
Make it send a single request back to a server you control.
Package your new web service inside the cracked installation file.
Put up for fileshare - wait a week.
You then have root access and the IP's to use it.
You can also substitute that second step
Re: (Score:2)
And Mafiaboy (Score:3, Insightful)
Who took down numerous big name websites, was sentenced to eight months of "open custody," one year of probation, restricted use of the Internet, and a small fine.
Lets face it, you can't properly gauge the sentence with the crime - too many other factors come into play that the judges are supposed to try and account for. Intent, remorse, etc etc - all play factors.
Re: (Score:1)
Odd indeed (Score:2)
He carried out the crimes from a PC in his mother's living room
Basement living room?
Welcome to planet Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
Thirty-three-year old Scottsman Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006.... By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison.
Matthew Anderson and David Kernell live, committed their offences and were tried in different countries to one another. Why on earth would you expect their sentences to be comparable?
Next.. libel laws in England harsher than in the US! Owners of internet gambling sites that are lawful in other countries face imprisonment in US! Producing the same drug can get you anywhere from a governement contract to a stern warning to imprisonment to execution depending on which country you pick. Hello, welcome to the world.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hello, welcome to the world.
Despite this, many retain a youthful and naive vision that perhaps, someday, the world will make sense and be fair. While we laugh at them as foolish, we should perhaps remember that when they were children, executives were laughing at the idea of a personal computer and IBM predicted a world market for them of perhaps a dozen.
Re: (Score:2)
They're naive and foolish because they still believe that "fair" is somehow an objective concept, not because it's too difficult. What I find fair isn't what you find fair, and the inverse is true. And unless you can find a scientific method to determine what is fair, this will always happen.
Re: (Score:1)
Why on earth would you expect their sentences to be comparable?
Some shared commonsense notion of justice?
I jest.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Not sure that's the most crucial distinction.
David Kernell was stupid enough to go after someone with power.
For God's sake (Score:3, Insightful)
It's spelled 'Scotsman', not 'Scottsman'.
A little proof-reading wouldn't go amiss.
Re: (Score:2)
"It's spelled 'Scotsman', not 'Scottsman'."
There's no true 'Scotsman' either way. :)
Re: (Score:1)
Grammmerz (Score:2, Funny)
"Thirty-three-year (1) old Scottsman (2) Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week (3) to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan (4) campaign in 2006. The reason for his relatively light sentence? He apparently wasn't seeking to maximize profit like any normal, red-blooded hacker. Also, his timing was good (5). His arrest in June 2006 predated (6) by a matter of months the Police and Justice Act, which would likely have resulted in a harsher sentence. By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison."
Let's play match the errors to the numbers, kids!
* Imaginary country
* Split infinitive
* Partial sentence
* Missing hyphen, implications of being a predator
* Oh, look! That hyphen reappeared
And my personal favourite:
* Hilarious capitalisation making it sound as though protagonist is leading an actual historical faction
So what the justice system is saying to us ... (Score:2)
is that the profit motive is evil.
Commit some act to maximize profit, get a harsh sentence. Commit exactly the same act without profit motive, get a light sentence.
If the profit motive adds N months to a sentence for some act, then by the most straightforward, linear morality arithmetic, this means that simply having a profit motive in the absence of committing any act is in and of itself a crime punishable by N months.
Nice communist values there.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think the intent is to equate profit motive with evil, it's to recognize that people with different motives need different incentives to be rehabilitated. A criminal with a profit motive is likely performing some sort of a cost/benefit analysis. Increase the punishment, and the criminal will be deterred from re-offending (and potential criminals may be deterred from offending at all).
Criminals without a profit motive, however, are a harder nut to crack. Maybe they have poor impulse control, or ha
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If criminals without a profit motive are a harder nut to crack, maybe they need to be punished more severely, not less, one would think.
I don't see why premeditated murder should be treated differently from a crime of passion. Murder is murder.
A crime of passion is in fact planned. A person knows exactly under what circumstances he would kill, and does so when circumstances arise which fit that pattern. Merely, such a killer perhaps does not think /specifically/ about a given situation. Thinking like ``I wo
Re: (Score:2)
A "harder nut to crack" as in a more complex issue. I think that was pretty clear in context. A criminal who, as in this case, did something for the mere excitement of it may be dissuaded from future offenses once he sees that his actions have consequences, and a slap on the wrist may be sufficient to accomplish that. Or he may be irredeemable, and may need to spend the rest of his life locked up. Prisons serve (or are meant to serve) many purposes: reform, rehabilitation, and deterrence, as well as sim
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's a multiplier?
I think it's a fair judgement that a crime committed for profit is worse than one committed out of curiosity. Less communist, more egalitarian.
My favorite part (Score:2, Interesting)
Differing situations vs the hit job on Kernell (Score:2)
Kernell was the victim of a political hit job, this guy ran a botnet that resulted in no profit.
Wide difference.
Scottsman? (Score:2)
When asked why he didn't just come clean... (Score:2)
Just 18 months versus a whole year? (Score:2)
I know the spammer got off lightly by comparison because he attacked more than one and a half computers and accounts... still, in the summary it would be honest to use consistent units - 18 months, 12 months.