Fergie's Tech Blog

'I Was A Teenage Bot Master'

Dan Goodin writes on The Register:

One day in May 2005, a 16-year-old hacker named SoBe opened his front door to find a swarm of FBI agents descending on his family's three-story house in Boca Raton, Florida. With an arm in leg in casts from a recent motorcycle accident, one agent grabbed his good arm while others seized thousands of dollars worth of computers, video game consoles and other electronics. His parents looked on.

At that moment, some 2,700 miles away, in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, California, the FBI was serving a separate search warrant on Jeanson James Ancheta, SoBe's 20-year-old employer and hacking mentor. It was the second time in six months Ancheta had been raided by the FBI, - a clear sign, had either bothered to notice, that their year-long botnet spree was unravelling.

posted by Fergie @ 5/08/2008 01:00:00 PM