Teen used botnets to push adware to hundreds of thousands of PCs

Computerworld - A teenager identified by U.S. law enforcement officials only as "B.D.H." pleaded guilty this week to charges that he used botnets to illegally install adware on hundreds of thousands of computers in the U.S., including some belonging to the military.

A statement (download PDF) from the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles announcing the teenager's plea calls him a "well-known juvenile member" of the botnet underground. Officials said the teenager pleaded guilty to two counts of juvenile delinquency for conspiring to commit wire fraud, causing damage to computers and accessing computers without authorization to commit fraud.

The teen is scheduled to be sentenced May 5. Under a plea agreement, he will receive a sentence ranging from one year to 18 months in prison.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Krause said that most of the materials related to the case, including details about the investigation, have been sealed because it involves a juvenile under the age of 18. Krause, however, supplied a redacted version of the charging document against B.D.H, which the courts have allowed to be made public.

According to the public statement and the charging document, B.D.H -- who was known online as "Sobe" -- worked with another person, Jeanson James Ancheta of Downey, Calif., in a scheme to make money by surreptitiously planting adware on large numbers of computers. Sobe and Anchetta, who was 20 at the time of his arrest in 2006, first enrolled as affiliates of legitimate online advertising companies in order to obtain affiliate identification numbers so they could get payments for adware installations. But the payments were supposed to be for adware programs installed with the consent of the user.

The two then illegally modified the adware so it could be installed without the user's knowledge or consent and hosted it on servers they controlled.

Between August 2004 and December 2005, Sobe and Anchetta broke into hundreds of thousands of computers and directed them via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to the adware-hosting servers. Once the servers then downloaded the modified adware, Sobe and Anchetta sought compensation from the online advertisers for each installation.

Among the computers infected were those belonging to the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and Sandia National Laboratories.

To avoid getting caught, the two varied the download times and the rate of adware installations on compromised machines. In the charging documents, prosecutors offered numerous examples of chat sessions between Sobe and Anchetta that focused on ways to infect computers and how to avoid detection by network administrators and the FBI.

The chats included discussions on new malware they planned to deploy, as well as methods for disabling systems.