Zotob Authors Jailed

Press reports this morning indicate that the two people arrested in the Zotob case have been jailed. According to Computerworld, "Farid Essebar, 19, of Morocco was sentenced to two years in prison on Tuesday by a Moroccan court, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. An accomplice, Achraf Bahloul, also of Morocco, received a one-year sentence, the report said." There's not much more to the story, it seems. You may recall that Zotob was used, in part, to fuel financial theft via the victims' computers. Zotob built a modestly sized botnet.

Shortly after the original Zotob worm came out last summer, these two guys were identified and arrested. I recall speaking at a local security group event that fall a few days after the arrests, and some federal law enforcement were in the room, as well as some corporate CSOs and such. I showed them some of the Zotob botnet data I had gathered for work, and mentioned that the two guys were apprehended a day or so earlier. They were all pleased, to say the least.

Still, botnet related arrests are exceedingly rare, given the number of botnet operators out there.