Melior reports first U.S. dDoS/BotNet Conviction

Dallas, May 9, 2006 --- Melior, Inc CyberWarfare Defense reports the first prosecution and conviction of a dDoS "BotMaster".

On May 8th, 2006, Jeanson James Ancheta, 20, of Downey, California, was sentenced to 57 months in prison with a further three-year period of supervised release for profiting from his use of 'botnets'. Mr. Ancheta had been arrested November 3rd, 2005, by special agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after he had been indicted on federal charges for profiting from the use of "botnets" – armies of computers that are under the control of the botmaster and are used to launch destructive attacks or to send huge quantities of spam across the Internet.

Mr. Ancheta admitted selling access to his botnets, a network of zombie machines with approximately 400,000 compromised computers, for as much as $3,000 a time in around 30 separate transactions.

The botnets were acquired by malicious adware for the specific purpose of proxy spamming and distributed Denial-of-Service (dDoS) attacks and counted the Naval Air Warfare Center and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) among their victims.

"We are very pleased to see a successful conviction, following the first prosecution of this kind in the United States," says Mr. Thomas J. Ackermann, Melior's CEO. "While the existence of 'botnets' has been a known fact and been warned of many times, this is the first time perpetrators in the underground could be held accountable. This is not the solution to the problem, as many more botnets of larger sizes exist, usually with their 'botMaster' located in other countries and jurisdictions - but one part of a mix of tools to combat the threat of Denial-of-Service attacks and Spam (UCE), as the financial damages from dDoS attacks continue to mount."

"We believe in a pro-active approach, by providing solutions inspecting all incoming traffic from the Internet and between subnets internal to large organizations, to automatically filter out spoofed IP-source request, and discard all malicious traffic in real-time," he continues. "Eventually, we hope to accomplish the acceptance of an additional layer of network- and application security, which we dubbed the 'CyberWarfare Defense' layer, as the necessity becomes more and more apparent."