Massive botnet take-down

A botnet comprising nearly 13 million infected PCs has been taken down. Three 'hackers' suspected of running the enterprise have been arrested and each face up to six years in jail. A report by The Associated Press said that, "the 'botnet' of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks," but quote police as claiming that the brains behind the operation were not computer experts.

Instead, they were individuals with contacts to the criminal online underground. "They're not like these people from the Russian mafia or Eastern European mafia who like to have sports cars and good watches and good suits - the most frightening thing is they are normal people who are earning a lot of money with cybercrime," Cesar Lorenza, a captain with Spain's Guardia Civil, said."

More from the report: "The Mariposa botnet, which has been dismantled, was easily one of the world's biggest. It spread to more than 190 countries, according to researchers. It also appears to be far more sophisticated than the botnet that was used to hack into Google Inc. and other companies in the attack that led Google to threaten to pull out of China."