Bot brings cops to the door

By now we're all well aware of the danger that bots pose. The remote control programs can turn your home computer into a spam-spewing zombie, steal your personal identity, distribute malicious code, or enlist you, unwittingly, in a massive denial of service attack on some unwitting network.

Now unwitting owners of bot infected machines have another thing to worry about: armed officers coming to your door and confiscating your PC.

According to Denver's 7 News, Denver resident Serry Winkler was greeted at her door by a team of armed officers bearing a search warrant and wearing flak jackets. (There's some dispute about whether the weapons were actually drawn -- Winkler says they were, the cops say they weren't.) In any case, the cops told Winkler they were looking for her PC and demanded she turn it over as part of a computer fraud investigation they were doing. Apparently, Winkler's computer had been 0wn3d by a bot (unnamed) and was being used to make fraudulent purchases online.

From the article: "Winkler didn't have a firewall on her computer, which she said was too old. 'I've tried it, but it just slows it down so badly that I can't,' she said."

Winkler's predicament (old hardware, resource intensive security software) tells us why these kinds of compromises are so common. Read down in the article and you see why its so hard to shut scams like this down:

"Detective Mike Wagner said what happened to Winkler was part of a large-scale scam traced to a cyber crime ring in Russia. A local sheriff in Colorado has no authority in Russia, so Boulder County has forwarded the investigative information to postal inspectors."

In the meantime, Ms. Winkler is in the market for a new PC for Christmas. Anyone want to take up a collection?

Posted by Paul Roberts on December 8, 2006