FBI's Bot Roast II Sees Great Success

coondoggie passed us another Network World link, this one discussing the FBI's newest offensive against botnets. They're calling it Operation Bot Roast II. Apparently it's already been quite successful, leading to indictments, search warrants, and the uncovering of some '$20 million in economic loss. writes "Today, botnets are the weapon of choice of cyber criminals. They seek to conceal their criminal activities by using third party computers as vehicles for their crimes. In Bot Roast II, we see the diverse and complex nature of crimes that are being committed through the use of botnets," said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. "Despite this enormous challenge, we will continue to be aggressive in finding those responsible for attempting to exploit unknowing Internet users." I can't help but think, though: how many more of these things are out there that this 'sting' didn't touch?

Seems like a cool job

[dave562]

Working for the FBI you'd get to put all of the knowledge that you have to use, your peers would look up to you for leveraging knowledge that you consider to be trivial, you'd get to go after spammers and botnet operators, AND you get to carry a firearm. Sure the pay kind of sucks, and the hours are probably pretty brutal at times, but all in all it would probably be a pretty good job.

About half

[QuietLagoon]

This past week or two, the SPAM level on my servers has been running about half of what iut had been last month. I chalked it up to the holidays, but now I wonder if the arrests had anything to do with the reduced level?

One thing that was overlooked here

[jskline]

One thing that was overlooked here or at least not explained is what happened to all the Bots??? I would be willing to bet that control of these Bots was handed over to another cohort or co-conspirator before being removed from access.

So it begs the question who now has all those Bots??? Are they or how do they plan to notify these people that their machines are infected and that they need to be cleaned...???

Re:don't worry about how many...

[Rinikusu]

Isn't this what many of us romanticized about back in the late 80s/early 90s? The Cyberpunks, with their l33t hacking skills, breaking into corporate dataspace, stealing intel, selling it to the highest bidder? Yeah, some innocent "civvies" get caught in the crossfire, but here it is. Except not.

Where are the grizzled, thick russian accented, boots wearing, crusty hackers in their survival-style grey-market Russian SUVs decked out with a hodgepodge of the sweetest, cutting edge tech and an old C-64 for shits and giggles online in the back? Where are the dark, smoke-filled bars where suits and data cowboys secretly meet up to exchange USB keys and microdrives for cold, hard cash?

The future is here, but it's certainly not sexy. Geeks are still geeks. :/