Fergie's Tech Blog

Web of Crime: Who's Catching the Cybercrooks?

I had almost forgotten to post the link to Part Five of the PCWorld.com series "Web of Crime" -- and then the FBI announcement of the suspected Zotob worm authors being detained abroad reminded me. Silly me. :-)

[This is Part Five in a Five Part series]

[Click for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.]

A PCWorld.com article by Tom Spring, via Yahoo! News, reports that:

In 2004, after months of putting a virtual tail on a hacker who called himself Pherk, Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Timothy Nestor had the guy right where he wanted him. Though unsure of Pherk's identity, Special Agent Nestor was tracking every digital footstep the hacker took as he wreaked havoc on dozens of businesses by shutting down their online storefronts.

Pherk's modus operandi was to commandeer an army of 2000 zombie computers and use those PCs simultaneously and repeatedly to request Web pages from the sites; the surge in queries would overwhelm the sites' servers, knocking the businesses offline. What the hacker didn't know was that Nestor, supervisor of the FBI's Cyber Crime Squad in New Jersey, had isolated one of the zombies and was now following the perpetrator's every online move.

Eventually the accumulating evidence of these illegal Web activities enabled the FBI to trace the attacks to 17-year-old Jasmine Singh Cheema. Nestor then obtained a search warrant; and in early December 2004, six FBI agents and two New Jersey state police officers barged into the Edison, New Jersey, home of Cheema's parents. According to Nestor, the 17-year-old Cheema sat at the family's dining room table and confessed everything to the FBI as his mother hovered nearby.