John Bombard, a resident of Seminole, Florida, has been charged for his alleged attack on service provider Akamai two years ago. Several big companies were affected in the attack, such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus.
Bombard allegedly commanded the modified Gaobot botnet from an IRC server hosted his own domain f0r.org.
If found guilty, Bombard faces 2 years for each charge, and a fine of up to $400,000 USD.
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.”
After the jail sentence Nessun will have a 3 year supervised period during which he will need to ask permission before he can use a computer. He will also have to pay $21,110 in damages to the (IRC) networks the DDoS was aimed at. Finally he will have to do 150 hours of community service and pay a $100 special assessment.
During speaking out the sentence judge Edmunds explained that computer crime has a serious impact on society and that a severe punishment was in order.
United States Attorney Stephen J. Murphy said, “The so-called “bot-masters” on the Internet should realize that attacking and damaging other computer networks through a bot-net can land you in prison. We have the capacity to investigate and prosecute these high tech crimes and we will continue to do so. I commend the FBI for the excellent investigative work they did in this case.”
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.”
In the whitepaper, McAfee suggests that intrusion prevention systems (IPS) are the best way to prevent PC’s becoming part of a botnet.
Allysa Myers from McAfee’s Avert Labs believes a radical change in security strategy is necessary, such as only allowing known traffic to prevent all malicious traffic that can include attacks to overtake PC’s.
“Things are looking fairly grim as the rise in the number of variants of IRC bots has grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Strictly using string-based detection against the unending tide certainly appears to be a lost cause,” Myers said.
Whee, I became a daddy! Two days ago our son Lucas was born, and both mom and son are doing OK! Forgive me if I am going to be a bit slow from time to time with the news and all. It’s quite bussy over here 
In October 1992 Danny “WildThang” Mitchell, Donald “WHIZZARD” Lambert, and Laurent “_dl” modified the EFnet irc2.7 IRC deamon and started an experimental network that became known as the Undernet IRC network. This month it will celebrates its 15th anniversary.
Today Undernet still is one of the largest IRC networks where on average 120k users are online.
More information on Undernet’s history can be found on this User-Com page.
Undernet’s User-Com is planning an event of which details are not yet known.
There is also a group of users who are independently from Undernet organizing an event which will take place the 25th of November in #undernet15.
IRC-Junkie spoke to one of the organizers of this party, Huggins. “We will also hold a “memorial” During the event also,” Huggins starts, “which will consist of paying tribute to “lost but not forgotton people”, such as JwPara, c00kie, Jail, Kevbo, etc. Also we will give the users who attend a chance to pay tribute to other “users” they’ve known that have passed away, so the Event isnt official, but all users can participate, as it’s a “Fun” Event at the same time also.”
This event also features a website which is not yet available at www.undernet15.com.
edit 7th Nov: A User-Com admin who wishes to remain anonymous told IRC-Junkie that currently no official event is planned to celebrate the event.