Security

"Silenz" Nabbed by the Feds

Hacker to be judged

By Alexandru Dumitru, Security News Editor

3rd of October 2007, 10:37 GMT

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Greg King, 21, of Fairfield California, also known as Silenz, Silenz420, sZ, GregK and Gregk707 is a hacker that has been recently netted by the American authorities after an intensive investigation by the

FBI.

This guy was a botnet herder or bot master, or whatever you wish to call him - he's the type of hacker that creates and manages a botnet. Not only is creating such networks illegal, but using them for distributed denial of service attacks is even worse. Even though you've heard so much about botnets lately, trust me, it's not an easy thing to create one. You've got to start from the ground up and work really hard, or have a lot of money to invest in this project, hoping you're going to eventually get more. This guy controlled about 7.000 bots - that's nowhere close to Storm, but still, it was a powerful enough network to deny service to some websites.

To launch a botnet-powered DDoS attack, the first thing you need is a lot of bots. You can transform computers into drones by infecting them with a virus that will allow you to control them. There are a lot of ways you can go around this, but the most prevalent one is the infection via e-mail, but to send a torrent of these type of e-mails you need a lot of addresses to send them to. So, you would also need to hack into a database, or use a bot to get you the addresses. Further more, presuming one could accomplish this and own a botnet, then he or she could start the attack.

To launch such an attack, a hacker would need to flood a computer with information until it is disabled. Things may seem hard, and they are, but they're also effective - botnets and DDoS are what ISPs fear most. This type of attack it pretty bad, so that's why this guy could get up to 10 years in jail and a total fine of $250.000!

TAGS:

botnet | hacker | FBI

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User opinions:

Comment #1 by: SETH on 22 Jul 2008, 10:58 GMT	reply to this comment
i think they should give him probation for what he did rather than prison and try to get him into doing other, more productive, things than hacking into thousands of pc's

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