Eideard

An FBI official said a two-year-long multinational investigation led them to nab a 23-year-old Slovenian, who allegedly created a malicious software code that infected 12 million computers worldwide.

Stephen Gaudin, a legal attache of the FBI to the U.S. embassy in Vienna, Austria, told reporters that the cooperation between the FBI, Slovenian and Spanish forces was “unparalleled.”

Slovenian police detained and questioned the man, identified only by his code name Iserdo, ten days ago, in the northwestern industrial city of Maribor. He was released after questioning, but police say they have made sure he cannot tamper with evidence or flee the country. They have not given details of how they have ensured that.

The investigation is ongoing and Iserdo was not formally indicted yet.

He is suspected of selling the malware to the operators of the Spanish Mariposa botnet — a network of infected computers — which stole credit cards and online banking credentials.

The Mariposa botnet, which has been dismantled, was easily one of the world’s biggest, infecting hundreds of companies and at least 40 major banks in 190 countries since appearing in Dec. 2008.

Toni Kastelic, the head of Slovenian police cyber crime department, said police also questioned another, 24-year-old person, and confiscated 75 computers in seven house searches…

He didn’t identify the chief suspect, Iserdo — which, read backwards, means “salvation” in Slovenian.

The dude is going to need more than salvation. Even with a plea deal exposing the other sleazeballs in his brigade of script-kiddies, I imagine – I hope – they throw away the key.

The last 12 months have seen significant success in combating one of the main forms of cybercrime – botnets.

These networks of hijacked home computers have become the basic tool for many cyber thieves. Maintaining them, finding new victims and using them has become a significant part of the net’s criminal economy.

The vast majority of spam is sent out via the computers on botnets; they are used to stage attacks on websites and the machines forming them are harvested for saleable information such as credit card numbers and game logins.

Shutting down the Mariposa, or butterfly, botnet was one of the bigger successes. It got its name because it was built using the butterfly bot kit…

Luis Corrons, a senior researcher at Panda Security, played a big part investigating Mariposa…

Finding out was only possible when one of Mariposa’s controllers accidentally revealed the net address of his home computer.

“In this case we were really lucky,” said Mr Corrons. “When I found the IP address imagine my face when I realised it was in Spain.”

Not only that but one of the men behind the botnet lived a few kilometers from the Bilbao lab where Mr Corrons worked.

He assumed that the arrest and closure of Mariposa would mark the end of his involvement of the investigation.

RTFA and grab a chuckle over the brass balls of the script kiddies who ran this packaged botnet.

How many? Apparently – two or three. Not any brighter than anyone else – absent honesty and ethics.