The son of a father who worked as a landscaper and a mother who taught middle school, SoBe came of age in Boca Raton, an affluent town about an hour's drive North of Miami made up mostly of older retirees. After quitting school, he spent much of his days coding in C++ and frequenting IRC channels related to hacking. It was in a now-defunct channel called #bottalk that he met Ancheta, who typically went under the moniker Resilient.

"He stood out from all the other people basically because he didnt bullsh*t people," SoBe recalled. "Most people you meet in the bot scene will claim they have xxxxx amount of bots but they dont and they lie about everything."

Unlike the others, Resilient had proof that he had sizable botnets under his control.

"You can't really lie about that when you take screenshots proving you have well over 70k," SoBe said. "It's hard to fake hundreds of exploit messages with unique IP addresses and a picture of him in a channel with 60,000 users."

SoBe was also drawn to Ancheta's social flair as demonstrated, among other things, by a MySpace profile that was packed with photos of his souped-up BMW and a passel of photogenic friends. "He isnt like your average computer nerd," SoBe explained. "He actually goes outside, has fun, partys."

Not all their hacking was business related. The two were part of a posse that defaced websites by compromising, or "rooting," vulnerable servers. They took great pride in their mischievous exploits, which they documented with graffiti they left behind.

But by and large, SoBe and Ancheta's relationship was about making money. When they first met, Ancheta's business model was in the midst of a major overhaul. He had been renting out his bots in a channel titled #botz4sale, but despite brisk demand, he hadn't been able to bring in the kind of money he hoped for. (According to fees tracked by prosecutors, it was less than $3,000, although the true fee was probably higher.)

Ancheta recruited SoBe to help him launch a new scheme installing adware on Ancheta's fleet of compromised machines and using them to generate pay-for-click affiliate fees from companies such as Gamma Entertainment, which ran a program called GammaCash; and CDT, which offered a program called LOUDcash. The new revenue model was an instant success.

"It's easy like slicing cheese," Ancheta typed, to which SoBe responded: "I just hope this [LOUDcash] stuff lasts a while so I don't have to get a job right away." In about a year, investigators tracked more than $58,000 in revenue from the scheme.

That unstoppable feeling

They felt unstoppable, SoBe said. Even after Ancheta's home was raided, in December 2004, and FBI agents confiscated his computer, "he was back online within a day" and the two continued their botnet activities. He felt the same invulnerability after Ancheta was locked up.

"It doesn't matter," SoBe insisted in the days immediately following his arrest. "James can get off, and go back to doing it and in under a month he will be making 3x what he made and be able to cover his tracks much better."

SoBe and Ancheta didn't know it immediately following the raids, but thanks to several slip-ups, they had been under the watchful eye of FBI agents, who were quietly building a case against the two hackers. The first mistake was Ancheta's brazen advertisements on #bots4sale, an act that moved him to the top of investigators' to-do list.

"Up to then, we hadn't seen anything as blatant," FBI agent Ken McGuire said in a 2006 interview. "Anybody who's blatant enough to advertise in internet message boards that you have botnets to sell is someone you want to clear off."

Not long afterwards, the pair came to the attention of investigators again, this time because of software bugs in rxbot, the package the two had appropriated and modified to build their bot empire. To keep the botnet growing, their zombie machines automatically looked for new machines on nearby networks to compromise. But as it turned out, their software was a little too aggressive.

"If it scanned its own subnet, its possible it would keep going and scan out of its subnet, potentially scanning a DoD network," SoBe explained. According to court documents, that's exactly what happened. SoBe and Ancheta's software ended up infiltrating machines belonging to the China Lake Navel Air Facility, the Defense Information Security Agency and Sandia National Labs.

"A lot of good evidence came from the military computers," McGuire said. "It was an excellent break in the case because it permitted us further analysis."

Bad code and backdoors

For their part, SoBe and Ancheta didn't seem to grasp the severity of their error at the time. In August 2004, an associate warned Ancheta by IRC chat to be sure "to filter out sh*t though like .gov and .mils" when his malware sought new victims. But two months later, when SoBe told Ancheta "hey btw there are gov/mil on the box if you want to get rid of them," Ancheta responded "rofl," according to court documents.

Another big blunder was SoBe's decision to lease a server using his real name and address. The pair used such boxes to host web servers and an IRC daemon that each of their bots reported to. By changing the topic in the IRC channels, they could cause the zombies to connect to other servers under their control and install any software they happened to host there. SoBe said he used his real identity "since i still dont approve of fraud."

SoBe was also convinced that investigators were able to infiltrate his botnet through a secret backdoor that had been built into their IRC daemon. He had gotten the program from Jonathan Hall, a hacker who in 2004 was charged -- but never convicted -- in a separate botnet investigation dubbed Operation Cyberslam.

The "server was in my name and [investigators] had a backdoor to gain oper status thx to some douchebags not telling us about it," SoBe complained bitterly.