Security Dutch Police Crush Big 'Botnet,' Arrest Trio October 10, 2005. Dutch police arrested three men for creating a botnet of more than 100,000 compromised PCs, authorities in the Netherlands said Friday. They allege the botnet was used in an attempt to extort a U.S. company, to steal PayPal and eBay accounts, and to install adware and spyware. The pinch is among the biggest botnet scores ever for law enforcement, Dutch authorities said. "With 100,000 infected computers, the dismantled botnet is one of the largest ever seen," the Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie, or OM) said in a statement.
The network of hijacked PCs and servers consisted of machines worldwide. The three men, ages 19, 22, and 27, allegedly used the Toxbot (aka Codbot) Trojan to infect the machines, on which they then installed adware and spyware. The massive botnet was also used to conduct a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against an unidentified U.S. company in an extortion attempt to squeeze payment for not bringing down the firm's Web site. Zombie PCs being sent to steal IDs CNET News.com. Triple-Barreled Trojan Attack Builds Botnets. Hewlett-Packard will apparently need close to two months to start fulfilling backorders for the (temporarily) revived TouchPad tablet. "It will take 6-8 weeks to build enough HP TouchPads to meet our current commitments, during which time your order will then ship from this stock with free ground shipping," read an email sent to customers and reprinted in a Sept. 7 posting on the Precentral.net blog.
"You will receive a shipping notification with a tracking number once your order has shipped. "That would place the new TouchPads in consumers' hands sometime in either late October or early November. The reduced-price devices are not returnable, according to the email. Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. Sasser The Last Big Network Worm. Triple-Barreled Trojan Attack Builds Botnets#2. Sasser The Last Big Network Worm#2.