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The Confessions of SoBe Owns

One day in May 2005, a 16-year-old hacker named SoBe opened his front door to find a swarm of FBI agents descending on his family's three-story house in Boca Raton, Florida. With an arm in leg in casts from a recent motorcycle accident, one agent grabbed his good arm while others seized thousands of dollars worth of computers, video game consoles and other electronics. His parents looked on.

At that moment, some 2,700 miles away, in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, California, the FBI was serving a separate search warrant on Jeanson James Ancheta, SoBe's 20-year-old employer and hacking mentor. It was the second time in six months Ancheta had been raided by the FBI, - a clear sign, had either bothered to notice, that their year-long botnet spree was unravelling.

But instead of abandoning the venture after the first raid, or at least laying low for a while, SoBe and Ancheta, according to court documents, continued hijacking hundreds of thousands of PCs that they would then corral into massive networks and infected with adware. So great was SoBe's sense of impunity he continued the scheme even after Ancheta was arrested a few months later and charged with 17 felonies related to the hijacking of almost 400,000 PCs, some of them belonging to the US Department of Defense.

SoBe - who also went under the names SoBe Owns, PwnZ0r, SerlissMc and vapidz - admitted to infecting computers belonging to the Defense Information Security Agency and Sandia National Laboratories.

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