While Northwest Hospital took the brunt of his alleged crimes, it also turned out to be Maxwell's undoing. Once IT managers noticed the presence of two scanning executables on their network, they notified authorities, and eventually the FBI got involved. Special agent David Farquhar monitored the infected machines and traced the route the executables took to the hospital over IRC channels, ISPs and domain providers until he landed on a phone number registered to the Maxwell home in Vacaville, Calif. Maxwell and two juvenile cohorts were arrested, their computers confiscated and their PayPal accounts raided-- allegedly $33,000 in payments from adware companies over a nine-month period was found. The investigation later showed that his botnet also damaged U.S. Department of Defense computers in Colorado and Germany. In May, he pleaded guilty in the botnet case; he faces a possible 15 yea...

Ancheta, meanwhile, was sentenced last month to nearly five years in prison. Using nicknames like fortunecookie and Resilient, Ancheta directed more than 400,000 computers in his botnet to install adware that he had altered to download surreptitiously. For a price, Ancheta also leased his zombie armies for DDoS attacks or for sending massive amounts of spam, prosecutors say.

"He is not some script kiddie," says federal prosecutor James Aquilina. "He is very sophisticated. He writes his own code, modifies existing code, and is tenacious and creative in preventing his bots from being detected by law enforcement and network administrators." The cases of Ancheta and Maxwell serve as a clear sign that cybercrime is profitable--a trend that enterprises cannot afford to ignore. "These are some smart guys doing evil stuff," Skoudis says.

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