FBI Operation Bot Roast ;)
New Folks that have been "Bot Roasted"
* Ryan Brett Goldstein, 21, of Ambler, Pa., was indicted on Nov. 1 for orchestrating attacks from a botnet of 50,000 PCs against various online chat networks. Goldstein, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, is accused of working with an individual from New Zealand to carry out the attacks. The FBI said additional suspects are being sought in that case.
* In a case being conducted by the U.S. Secret Service, Robert Matthew Bentley of Panama City, Fla., was indicted Tuesday for allegedly installing ad-serving software on more than 100 computers owned by Newell Rubbermaid.
* Adam Sweaney, 27, of Tacoma, Wash., pled guilty on Sept. 24 to maintaining a botnet of hundreds of thousands of compromised PCs, which he then rented out to spammers and people who wanted to use the bot network to knock certain Web sites offline. Sweaney also admitted to selling access to tens of millions of hijacked Hotmail and Yahoo! Webmail accounts.
* Florida residents Alexander Dmitriyevich Paskalov, 38, and Azizbek Takhirovich Mamadjanov, 21, were sentenced to 42 months and 24 months in prison, respectively, for their roles in phishing scams targeting multiple U.S. banks. Over a four month period beginning in March 2006, the routed millions of dollars stolen from phishing victims to shell companies that they created and controlled.
Also named was Gregory King, 21, of Fairfield, Calif., who was indicted in September for carrying out online attacks against CastleCops, an all-volunteer group that fights phishing and virus attacks.
Finally, Jason Michael Downey, 24, of Dry Ridge, Ky., who was named in the original Bot Roast operation, was sentenced to a year in prison for running a botnet of about 6,000 machines, which he used to attack others online.
