After unleashing an army of zombie machines whose controls had been taken over, Jeanson James Ancheta accepted his guilt on four charges of felony in a Los Angeles court and could face upto 25 years in prison. The law caught up with Ancheta in a hitech sting operation after some machines from the US Naval Air Warfare Center and the US Department of Defense were drawn into his zombie network.
Unlike past cases of hacking Ancheta directly profited from his hacking-cum-botnet operation by not only creating and spreading malware but also by selling access and generating adware revenue. His conviction proved to be first time that such a hacker was brought to the book in America. With the final decision on the sentence due on 1st May, Judge R. Gary Klausner is to approve the hacker's plea.
FBI snared the 20-year-old hacker whom they believe wrote computer code to assemble botnets and sell access rights after he was lured into a trap. Ancheta in his plea accepted responsibility for selling botnets and directing zombie machines to surreptitiously download adware besides intruding into government computers.
Ancheta is understood to have as a result benefited by $3,000 from botnet sales and $60,000 from the clandestine adware downloads. With close to 400000 machines under his control, Ancheta was doing well enough to gift himself a BMW.
The last count agreed upon by Ancheta is the unauthorized and fraudulent access of computers with the intention of profiting. As per the agreement of his plea, Ancheta has to give up over $58,000 of money he made, his BMW besides paying $20,000 as the compensation for infecting US government computers. But as compared to the initial 17 charges leveled upon Ancheta in the case, the conviction is only on four charges.
The conviction however marks an important success for cyber crime investigators, setting a precedent for tracking and prosecuting other Ancheta-like bot herders. Only in October did the Dutch authorities similarly track down three young men who similarly took over control of 1.5 million machines.
Earlier in August, the Zotob virus was tracked down to have originated from Turkey and Morocco and the men behind it were identified with help from FBI and Microsoft. Hopefully, these cases will go down as important measures in the fight against new age crimes.
