In our last column, we wrote about global enforcement efforts to combat international bribery.1 In this column, we describe efforts to combat a different but far more insidious form of international crime. This type of crime has been deemed so serious that on Feb. 24, 2015, the U.S. Department of State’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program offered a $3 million bounty for information leading to the arrest or conviction of one particularly egregious alleged perpetrator. An Al Qaeda mastermind? No, a 30-year-old botnet programmer.
Derived from the words “robot” and “Internet,” a “botnet” is a network of software programs on different computers that allows them to be collectively controlled by a cyber criminal. The network of computers can be used to commit crimes such as identity theft, denial of service attacks, computer ransoming and massive spam campaigns. Botnets know no borders other than software compatibility. They are designed to spread to computers without revealing their existence. They cause at least hundreds of millions of dollars in economic harm every year, not to mention the inestimable personal harm caused to individual victims of identity theft.
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