Bot Net Charges

The Register reports that in what prosecutors have labeled the first case of its kind in the nation, a federal grand jury charged Jeanson James Ancheta with seventeen counts of conspiracy and computer crime stemming from his alleged profitable use of bot nets.

The arrest comes as authorities are turning up the heat on bot herders, the name for people that control millions of compromised computers worldwide. In October, Dutch authorities arrested three men in the Netherlands who allegedly controlled a network of more than 1.5 million compromised computers. In August, the FBI and Microsoft helped authorities in Turkey and Morocco track down two men suspected of creating and spreading the Zotob worm--a program that consisted of bot software modified to exploit a flaw in Windows 2000.