First published: 30th June 2007
The USA Department of Justice and FBI have announced the results of their ongoing "Operation Bot Roast", a cyber crime initiative to disrupt the activities of botherders and dismantle botnets. Investigations have identified over 1 million victim computer IP addresses and are working with industry partners and the CERT Coordination Center to notify the owners of the compromised machines. They hope to uncover additional incidents where the zombies have been used to facilitate other criminal activity.
They caution that the FBI will not contact you online and request your personal information so be wary of fraud schemes that request this type of information, especially via unsolicited emails. Reports of fraudulent activity should be made to the FBI or police, or can be made online at the Internet Crime Complaint Center, www.ic3.gov. It is not made clear whether this URL should only be used for USA crimes.
Three suspects have been charged or arrested as a result of Operation Bot Roast, so far:
- James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, is alleged to have operated a botnet that infected Chicago area hospitals. This botnet infected tens of thousands of computers worldwide. (FBI Chicago);
- Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Kentucky, is charged with an Information with using botnets to send a high volume of traffic to intended recipients to cause damage by impairing the availability of such systems. (FBI Detroit);
- Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle, Washington, is alleged to have used a large botnet network and spammed tens of millions of unsolicited email messages to advertise his website from which he offered services and products. (FBI Seattle)
The FBI asserts its continued commitment to aggressive investigation of cyber criminals.