IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

In May 2004 IRC-Junkie reported about the ongoing problems for the IRCHighway network caused by DDoS. In June of this year Jason Michael Downey, known as Nessun and owner of the network Rizon, was arrested for these problems.

This PDF outlines the sentence Nessun heard on the 23rd of this month. We can read: “Jason Michael Downey, the operator of “bot network” of virus infected computers that he used to attack other computer systems, was sentenced to a year in federal prison today on his conviction for unlawful computer intrusion that caused over $20,000 in damages to other computer networks, United States Attorney Stephen J. Murphy announced today.”

Remarkable news released by researchers from McAfee this week. Baylor and Brown, researchers at McAfee warn that the national security of multiple countries are threatened by the existence of botnets.

“A botnet of one million bots, with a conservative 128 Kbps broadband upload speed per infected bot, can wield a powerful 128 gigabits of traffic,” the whitepaper reported. “This is enough to take most of the Fortune 500 companies (and several countries) offline using DDoS attacks. If several large botnets are allowed to join together, they could threaten the national infrastructure of most countries.”

Nessun, owner of the Rizon IRC network, has been named before on this website as source of DDoS attacks. IRC-Junkie was unaware that one of the three suspects reported about in the “FBI Arrests Three Botherders” article written 10 days ago, namely Jason Michael Downey, is in fact the same Nessun.

Downey, 24, has pleaded guilty for operating a botnet and computer fraud. Asking his reasons behind performing DDoS attacks U.S. District Judge Nancy G. Edmunds heard his reply: “I was doing it because I could, more than anything,” Downey replied. “It was a dumb thing to do.”

With the arrest of three suspect botherders the FBI discovered botnets that consist of about a million infected machines worldwide. Amongst the charges for the three are spamming and infecting IT systems at hospitals.

The operation took place under the name “Operation Bot Roast”, which is an on-going operation to hunt down botnets and their owners.

Among the three men arrested is Robert Soloway from Seattle, a long time spam king. Another man, Downey, controlled his botnet consisting of Agobot infected machines from an IRC server and performed DDoS attacks.

Although botnet masters increasingly use platforms other then IRC to command their zombie networks, it remains the biggest platform in use to date.

These botnets are being used by malicious users to perform DDoS attacks, collect personal data such as banking info and creditcard details and for example to use as a base to send spam. The machines used in the botnets are usually compromised home PC’s.