An IT professional employed by Internet company Mahalo.com has been sentenced to four years in jail and is the first person in the nation to plead guilty to wiretapping charges in connection with the use of botnets.
John Schiefer, 26, of Los Angeles will begin his sentence June 1 after an investigation by the FBI called Operation Bot Roast II found Schiefer was involved in several scams.
Schiefer developed an army of botnets while employed by 3G Communications, a telecom company based in Los Angeles, according to documents released by the U.S. district attorney in central California. With the botnets, Schiefer was able to watch Internet traffic between victims and companies such as PayPal.
Once in control of PCs, Schiefer, along with accomplices, would take money from his victims’ bank accounts or use their financial accounts to make purchases.
Sizable Attacks
His malicious dealings didn’t end there. Schiefer also gave stolen usernames and passwords to others and stole information from several computers by accessing Windows PStore, a secure storage area, with malware.
Schiefer also defrauded a Dutch Internet advertising company out of $19,000 by promising to install adware only when owners gave consent. Instead, he installed the program on 150,000 computers without the owners’ consent.
“This is pretty sizable,” said Jose Nazario, manager of security research with Arbor Networks. “The number of machines he has pleaded guilty to controlling is pretty sizable among the larger botnets we generally see. If one in five computers have, say, a direct credit card, that is a huge amount of gain potential (for the hacker) and loss for individuals and financial institutions.”
In April, Schiefer pled guilty to charges of Federal wiretapping and faced a sentence of up to 60 years in federal prison and a fine of $1.75 million.
“By and large, this kind of criminal complaint…