Alleged Mariposa Botnet Hacker Arrested in Slovenia

The mastermind of the largest 'botnet' network in the world was arrested today, July 28th 2010. A 23 year old hacker from Slovenia known only as Iserdo.

The Mariposa botnet, Spanish for butterfly, infected over 12 million computers in over 190 countries.

Created by the DDP Team (Días de Pesadilla Team – Nightmare Days Team in English), the Mariposa Botnet was used to generate money in a number of ways, including:

• Renting to other criminals
• Theft of passwords, credit card numbers, and more
• Changing rank of websites in search engines (SERPS)
• Displaying pop up advertisements

Various law enforcement and computer security experts came together from around the world to form the Mariposa Working Group (MWG). However, the DDP Team used Virtual Private Networks (VPN's) to hide their IP Addresses, making tracking extremely difficult.

They were caught when the gang leader connected to the botnet command center from his home computer in a frantic attempt to wrestle control back from the security team.

Learn More about the Mariposa Botnet case here...