Online fraudsters and data thieves are more frequently using bot
networks to get home and business PCs to do their bidding, with some
estimates of the number of infected systems as high as 47 million.
An article in USA Today
delves into three arrests in the last year of the people who allegedly
created and controlled bot networks, known as bot masters or bot
herders: Jeanson James Ancheta, who plead guilty in January to computer intrusion charges; Farid Essebar, the alleged creator of the Zotob worm; and Christopher Maxwell, charged with creating a bot network to grow an adware affiliate network.
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