180, Loudcash and the year-long Botnet...

Well, I have returned from India to find every weblog out there mentioning the 180 / CDT thing - that snapped me out of post-flight gooseberry syndrome, I can tell you. There was one other thing I spotted, however - and it probably isn't the best of things to land on 180's doorstep while the CDT get all Medieval on people's ass.From Wired News:

Starting in August 2004, Ancheta turned to a new, more lucrative method to profit from his botnets, prosecutors said. Working with a juvenile in Boca Raton, Florida, whom prosecutors identified by his internet nickname "SoBe," Ancheta infected more than 400,000 computers.

Ancheta and SoBe signed up as affiliates in programs maintained by online advertising companies that pay people each time they get a computer user to install software that displays ads and collects information about the sites a user visits.

Prosecutors say Ancheta and SoBe then installed the ad software from the two companies -- Gamma Entertainment of Montreal, Quebec, and Loudcash, whose parent company was acquired last year by 180Solutions of Bellevue, Washington -- on the bots they controlled, pocketing more than $58,000 in 13 months.

Ouch. That's a whole lotta' lettuce.

And it looks like Loudcash were particulary good for this guy's scheming:

"I just hope this (Loudcash) stuff lasts a while so I don't have to get a job right away," SoBe told Ancheta during a different conversation.

Considering the amount of people we've seen gaming the 180 system this past year, including repeated appearances of their software in the recent Rootkit-Botnet bundles, they better have some top security-type bloke patching things up over at Loudcash. I'm not too familiar with Loudcash software, but it certainly looks like this guy was having a wonderful time with it.