James Ancheta aka "Resjames" or "Botmaster" pleaded quilty in Los Angeles yesterday for running a botnet and selling bots.
He faces up to six years in prison. He will also have to pay restitution and give back about $60,000 and his BMW, bought with botnet money.
Ancheta was active in 2004. With another bot herder known as "SoBe", they infected more than 400,000 computers.
They were making money by selling bots to spammers, and by signing up as affiliates in adware install programs run by Gammacash and Loudcash (both are owned by 180Solutions nowadays). This way they earned money every time they installed an adware program to an infected machine.
You can read the full story at fsecure.com
Good that they cought up with the spammer, althought this is one of many. The only way to improve the situation is if the user get some responsibility. Please, do your best to read up and learn about securing your own system. Hopefully secure-my-internet.com can guide you on the way.
