Bot herder pleads guilty to hospital hack

When is enough, enough?!!

Quote:

---

A 20-year-old Californian pleaded guilty last week to causing damage to computers in Seattle's Northwest Hospital when his bot software compromised systems in the healthcare facility.

...searching for more computers to infect, the bot software used by the group caused trouble amongst some systems at Northwest Hospital: doors to the operating room failed to open, pagers did not work, and computers in the intensive care unit were disrupted...

Source

---

Sooner or later the deviants will disrupt a computer that is keeping a loved one alive. It's a shame that nothing is really accomplished until after someone dies.

cheers

Hi Relyt ,

Very interesting post. It is a fact of "botware" that it is unintelligent, and will infect everything and anything.

I was interested that you used the term "herder"................. over here they are "botmasters" or "botmeisters" ;)

I hope that the douchebag gets 10~20; as he deserves some serious "Bubbatime" although, being as how it is California, he might enjoy that?

I would recommend to the Judge that he serves his time in Georgia :D

Related incident: Botmaster gets 57 months in prison

Quote:

---

Ancheta was accused in the original 17-count indictment of hijacking some 500,000 computers using "bots," or programs that surreptitiously install themselves on computers so they can be controlled by a hacker.

---

Hopefully the more these people get caught, having to pay restitution and jail time will actually make some people think before trying something like this.

IMO, the number of PC hijacked shows that most people still refuse to take security and ensuring their PCs are up-to-date seriously. It's a little scary to me that both of these cases involved the military and makes me wonder how "open" their systems really are to the world.

So the other day I was on my friends server checking out some things cuz his files got deleted. I added phpshell to it so I could get a better look. I noitced a lot of misconfiguration by the hoster and then found botnet code in /tmp. The code gave me enough to get on the irc server and go into the channel were there were about 20 bots. It also gave me enough info to control all the bots (ie. controlled by a specific username and no pass required).

So really I dont even know what to do with it. I guess I could control each bot and have then send mail to root saying your box has been compromised but I dont know if Im crossing a legal line there, so really now that I found it what should I do? I mean who do you report this stuff to?