All these folks are US citizens. Not only that these guys appear to be nowhere near the birghtest stars in the constellation. I really don't think these FBI scare tactics are going to work very successfully on the botmasters who control the gigantic botnets and who live well outside US jurisdiction.

Low hanging fruit ... that FBI division is only releasing this report so their superiors think they are doing something and are convinced to continue funding them. 2 million? Pff. Probably 4x that. (It's nice to note that China has 49% of the world's zombies, though. haha)

According to a New Zealand newsreport "AKILL" an 18 year old man "is now co-operating with police". He was "allegedly an international cyber-crime leader".

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4298686a10.html

Try atleast 55 million zombies. I've had the privilege of helping take down a botnet consisting of 1.5mil zombies, based in China, of course. Took us over half a year of watching how it was operated, and it was before p2p botnets were widespread. The guy made a mistake a few times, and one of my contacts took control of the botnet and dismantled it. He has much more experience in this than I do.

For Windows at least, it's time that MS put some speedbumps in the way of the cheapo firewall-less USB ADSL modems, and refused to connect to anything that wasn't an MS patch update server after a clean "naive user" install.

> The point is to chip away at the perception among miscreants that online crime is risk-free...

Exactly... even if the job is difficult, giving up and letting the baddies carry on isn't an option. Difficulties with jurisdiction are, of course, a major issue, but it's worth at least dealing with the known threats from one's own jurisdiction.

Here in the UK, it's very unusual to find IOCA (images of child abuse) being commercially distributed from servers situated within any of the domestic jurisdictions [Scotland and N. Ireland have their own legal systems], although individuals invariably continue to download on to their own machines. Why? Because of the proactive efforts of CEOP, SOCA, and local police forces to identify users and distributors, and the heavy penalties on conviction.

Great. Doesn't look like any of those dudes is the botnet master for Storm. I'd say it would be better if they went after overseas botnet masters, as I think the masters are Russian dudes.

And the FSB on your tails ought to be spookier than the FBI ... after all, they are the former KGB ;)