FBI crackdown on botnets gets results, but damage continues FBI agents engaged in a crackdown on botnet crime issued a progress report of the ongoing initiative, reporting more than $20m in losses to consumers, businesses and other organizations and the identification of one million infected machines in the past five months. In addition, eight individuals have been indicted, have …
All these folks are US citizens. Not only that these guys appear to be nowhere near the birghtest stars in the constellation. I really don't think these FBI scare tactics are going to work very successfully on the botmasters who control the gigantic botnets and who live well outside US jurisdiction.
Try atleast 55 million zombies. I've had the privilege of helping take down a botnet consisting of 1.5mil zombies, based in China, of course. Took us over half a year of watching how it was operated, and it was before p2p botnets were widespread. The guy made a mistake a few times, and one of my contacts took control of the botnet and dismantled it. He has much more experience in this than I do.
> The point is to chip away at the perception among miscreants that online crime is risk-free...
Exactly... even if the job is difficult, giving up and letting the baddies carry on isn't an option. Difficulties with jurisdiction are, of course, a major issue, but it's worth at least dealing with the known threats from one's own jurisdiction.
Here in the UK, it's very unusual to find IOCA (images of child abuse) being commercially distributed from servers situated within any of the domestic jurisdictions [Scotland and N. Ireland have their own legal systems], although individuals invariably continue to download on to their own machines. Why? Because of the proactive efforts of CEOP, SOCA, and local police forces to identify users and distributors, and the heavy penalties on conviction.
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