Yesterday, the FBI and US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles announced the indictment and arrest of 20-year-old Jeanson James Ancheta, of Downey, CA, on federal charges for profiting from the use of botnets. From the press release: “Ancheta was indicted yesterday in two separate conspiracies, as well as substantive charges of attempting to cause damage to protected computers, causing damage to computers used by the federal government in national defense, accessing protected computers without authorization to commit fraud and money laundering. . . . The second conspiracy outlined in the indictment alleges that Ancheta caused adware to be downloaded onto the infected computers that were part of his botnet armies. To do this, Ancheta allegedly directed the compromised computers to other computer servers he controlled where adware he had modified would surreptitiously install onto the infected computers.”

Mr. Ancheta formerly distributed the 180search Assistant from September 2004 to January 2005 through his relationship with CDT.  In January 2005, though, he suddenly stopped. Based on preliminary analysis, Mr. Ancheta exploited our software in only a small percentage of the wrongdoing alleged in the indictment.

Any exploitation is too much, of course. So we will continue to cooperate with the FBI on this and other investigations and are providing whatever information we can to hold Mr. Ancheta accountable for his alleged actions. And we will continue to make significant enhancements to our software and our distribution policies, our goal being to better protect and enhance the end-user experience. Today, due to some of our most recent improvements, we can virtually guarantee that even if our software were to be bundled into a botnet distribution, the proper notification will be shown and user consent would have to obtained before it could actually be installed. This is huge progress. The transition to this new technology will be network-wide by the end of the year, at which time there will be no financial incentive to illegally distribute our software, through botnets or otherwise.