427 Botnet fm qxd

www.syngress.com
Botnets: A Call to Action • Chapter 1
19
427_Bot_01.qxd 1/8/07 11:53 AM Page 19

---

He also used a botnet of more than 400,000 zombies to generate income
in a “Clicks for Hire scam” by surreptitiously installing adware for which he
was paid more than $100,000 by advertising affiliate companies. A U.S.
Department of Justice (DOJ) press release stated that Ancheta was able to
avoid detection by varying the download times and rates of the adware instal-
lations, as well as by redirecting the compromised computers between various
servers equipped to install different types of modified adware.
Anthony Scott Clark
In December 2005, Anthony Scott Clark of Beaverton, Oregon, pled guilty to
infecting thousands of computers and then to using those computers to con-
duct a DoS attack. According to the DOJ press release (www.usdoj.gov/crim-
inal/cybercrime/clarkPlea.htm), Mr. Clark admitted to the following:
From July through August 2003, Mr. Clark participated with
several others in DDoS attacks on the Internet against eBay,
Inc. and other entities. A DDoS attack is one in which many
compromised computers (or bots) attack a single target,
thereby causing a denial of service for legitimate users of
the targeted system. 
Mr. Clark and his accomplices accumulated approximately 20,000 bots by
using a worm program that took advantage of a computer vulnerability in the
Windows Operating System—the “Remote Procedure Call for Distributed
Component Object Model,” or RPC-DCOM vulnerability.The bots were
then directed to a password-protected IRC server, where they connected,
logged in, and waited for instructions. When instructed to do so by Mr. Clark
and his accomplices, the bots launched DDoS attacks at computers or com-
puter networks connected to the Internet. Mr. Clark personally commanded
the bots to launch DDoS attacks on the nameserver for eBay.com. As a result
of these commands, Mr. Clark intentionally impaired the infected computers
and eBay.com.
Mr. Clark’s case was investigated by agents of the U.S. Secret Service’s
Electronic Crimes Task Force.The effort was overseen by the U.S. Attorney’s
Office’s Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) Unit.