Cybercrime pays?
Date: May 11, 2006Source: blogs.chron.com
Ok, first... In Los Angeles, Jeanson Ancheta was sentenced to a 57 month in jail for operating a network of infected machines which included military server systems. An Enterprise Security Today article, notes that Ancheta managed to infect as many as 400,000 computers with malware that allowed him to send huge amounts of spam and launch distributed attacks on servers. It was found that Ancheta charged $3,000 for access to his "bot" network in addition to generating over $100,000 by downloading ad-generating software to the infected machines.
Then... as reported on eWeek, Gary McKinnon, a British man accused of illegally accessing United States government agency computers, will be extradited to the U.S to face up to 70 years in jail. McKinnon admits having gained access to Pentagon, U.S. Army and Nasa computers systems but denies that there was any damaged caused - the U.S. government, on the other hand, claims that damage is comparable to $700,000.
So the lesson here is that cybercrime pays the best if your targets are U.S. military or other government agency computers.
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