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posted by martyb on Friday December 08 2017, @02:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the price-of-freedom-is-eternal-vigilence dept.

The mastermind behind some of the world's biggest and longest-running botnets has been jailed and his vast criminal infrastructure taken down, in part because of a careless operational security blunder that allowed authorities to identify his anonymous online persona.

Officials from the Republic of Belarus reported Monday they detained a participant in the sprawling Andromeda botnet network, which was made up of 464 separate botnets that spread more than 80 distinct malware families since 2011. On Tuesday, researchers with security firm Recorded Future published a blog post that said the participant was a 33-year-old Belarusian named Sergey Jarets.

To most people, Jarets was known only as "Ar3s," the moniker assigned to a highly respected elder in the criminal underground. In online discussions, Ar3s demonstrated expertise in malware development and the reverse-engineering of software. He also acted as a reputable guarantor of deals that were hashed out online. As it turned out, the ICQ number of the figure he used as one of his primary contact methods was registered in several whitehat discussion forums to one Sergey Jaretz.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/mastermind-behind-massive-botnet-tracked-down-by-sloppy-opsec/


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 08 2017, @04:15PM (1 child)

    by looorg (578) on Friday December 08 2017, @04:15PM (#607248)

    I assume there is a small core of users left, sort of like for almost all old technology. ICQ used to be great tho, it probably still is. It just sort of got replaced by other things. It didn't become bad or anything.

    http://www.miranda-im.org/ [miranda-im.org]
    I see that my preferred client is still around and kicking.

    https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/downloads/ [miranda-ng.org]
    it's even forked apparently. looking at the language support one would assume it's fairly popular in eastern Europe.

    Miranda was always interesting since it supported so many different chat protocols all in one. I guess it just sort of faded out of existence as more and more people/friends stopped using it and I guess now we just message each other on our phones instead.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2017, @09:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2017, @09:05PM (#607423)

    Bah, I don't need that new-fangled stuff.

    Just give me UUNet on CompuServe and I'm fine.

    My 14.4 Rockwell modem still works, too.