California native Jeanson James Ancheta has pleaded guilty to four felony charges of unauthorized use of other people's computers to create a "botnet," a network of compromised machines that are used to send out spam and collect advertising data. The botnet in question included computers at two US military sites, and had earned Ancheta more than US$61,000 over the last year and a half.

Ancheta used common cracking tools to search the Internet for machines that had not been properly updated and patched to fix old security holes. As each machine was compromised, he added it to his list, which allegedly reached as many as 400,000 computers. To reach this number, Ancheta partnered up with a juvenile in Boca Raton, Florida, who due to prosecution laws can only be identified by his Internet nickname, SoBe.