Maintainers of 100 000+ computer botnet arrested

Today the Dutch authorities have made the news of a major bust of cybercriminals public. (Dutch)

The Dutch police have arrested three men who are suspected to have set up a botnet of more than 100 000 computers worldwide.

The botnet was used to steal confidential information such as creditcard and banking data as well as to conduct DDoS attacks.

The malware used by the hackers was based on Backdoor.Win32.Codbot(an IRCBot), which was regularly altered to avoid detection by virusscanners.

It’s also likely that they were making malware which can spy on login info for online banking, for which they were paid.

Alledgedly they also blackmailed a company in the US, threatening to take down their website by DDoS.

Next to these things it’s also probable that they were breaking into PayPal and eBay accounts.

The prime suspect is 19 years old, the others are 22 and 27. More arrests are likely to follow.

I personally hope that it’s clear by now that age doesn’t (always) matter.
As in my opinion the punishments for younger cybercriminals have been rather on the soft side in the Netherlands so far.