Man Found Guilty For Spreading Trojan Via IRC; Face Imprisonment

A plea agreement on file with the federal court, St Louis, Missouri, states that Richard C. Honour used the used ID Fyle to infect Internet Relay Chat users with a malevolent program, WindowsMedia.exe. Reportedly, servers for one of IRC network are situated in Missouri. The malevolent program installed a backdoor, which gave the 31-year old hacker access to the victim's computer.

Catherine L. Hanaway, Attorney, United States, quoted in a press release that computer malware has the capability to causing excessive damage to the country' economy. Catherine further added that the case would be pursued aggressively. Tracking a computer offense can be difficult and tedious and this case demonstrates the excellent work done by the FBI agents, who responded to every compliant from e-community and trailed every lead until the case was resolved.

Honour now will have to face upto 5 years of imprisonment and $250,000 as fine for his crime. He just used IRC private inquiries and managed to compel people on DarkMyst IRC network to visit malevolent links and eventually become infected. He then exploited the infection systems to collect information from people. But it hasn't been clarified yet what sort of information he was looking for.

Among other infections, the malevolent program caused users to spam other users of IRC to virally distribute itself. A raid by FBI on Honour's home discovered some documents claiming he had stole information from victims' computers.

Zachary Lowe, Supervisory Special Agent, FBI, St Louis Division, stated that the FBI places the detection and investigation of cyber crooks on high priority. This case shows the highly intricate nature of cyber crime and the investigative modalities needed to fight this threat.

In 2006, federal prosecutors observed the conviction of two high-profile cases. In one case, a 21 year old guy from Southern California received almost 5 years imprisonment for spreading botnet. In second case, a 21 year old was pleaded guilty for botnet crimes, which damaged thousands of computers, including some at a Seattle hospital.

Security vendors suggest keeping the security system of the computer up-to-date to avoid any attack and not clicking to any doubtful link.

Related article: Man Sues and Wins against ISP for Spamming Mail

» SPAMfighter News - 3/5/2007