[citation][nom]dalethepcman[/nom]Why would a real hacker use his personal laptop from his new york apartment? The real hacker is in Nigeria/China/Russia/Arkansas remoting into a web server, opening a vpn tunnel, connecting to a proxy, repeating the last 3 steps over and over again until they feel comfortable, then uploading their payload to one of their botnet hosts.The saddest part about this, is that the people they arrested were probably part of said botnet and didn't even know that their computers were ddos'ing the FBI, or they bragged to some video game buddy about being a leader of Autonomous trying to gain some street cred and frighten the sheep. At least the FBI has found someone to point the finger at, and in the end thats what really matters, its not about catching the criminals, its about convicing the public that you caught the criminals. Off to Guantanamo terrorist! Guilty until proven innocent or executed./TinFoilHat off[/citation]
The FBI is smarter than that. They'd have proof that the systems weren't just proxies to remote machines before arresting anyone. Likely, these guys were the rank and file, script kiddies who didn't know how to insulate themselves too well. These kids will give up information on the higher ups in order to get lesser sentences. That's the way they bust drug dealers, and that's the way they'll work this deal. The really good hackers will likely be as difficult to catch as high level drug dealers, too.