Stiff Fines for Cyber Crimes

Back in January, I wrote about a botherder, Jeanson Ancheta, who pleaded guilty to selling botnets to other cyber criminals for use in DDoS attacks. He was sentenced the other day to almost 5 years in prison. That is historically rather harsh for a cyber-based crime, and it also seems stiff for something that was plea-bargained down from the prosecutor. I guess if he hadnt taken the plea deal he would be facing decades behind bars.

Its about time that the justice system began to take cyber crime this seriously.

From the AFP here:

US ‘botmaster’ jailed for nearly 5 years for computer hacking

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A US computer hacker was jailed for nearly five years for hijacking around 400,000 computers, including military servers, and infecting them with malicious software.

Sealing the first prosecution of its kind, US federal Judge Gary Klausner in Los Angeles sentenced “botmaster” Jeanson Ancheta, 20, to 57 months in jail for taking control of an array of computers he had corralled into his “Botnet.”

Ancheta had pleaded guilty in January to infecting the computers with software that caused them to send spam, show ads and launch crippling attacks on Internet sites.

The crime was “extensive, serious and sophisticated,” the judge told the court as he handed down the longest-known sentence for someone accused of spreading computer viruses.

“Your worst enemy is your own intellectual arrogance that somehow the world cannot touch you on this,” the judge told Ancheta.

In more than 30 separate transactions, he sold networks of up to 10,000 infected “bots” each, his plea agreement stated.