The following information was released by the United States Attorney's Office for the Central District of California:

Concluding the first prosecution of its kind in the nation, a man associated with the botnet underground was sentenced late today to 48 months in federal prison for using his botnets armies of compromised computers to steal the identities of victims throughout the country by extracting information from their personal computers and wiretapping their communications.

John Schiefer, 27, of Los Angeles, who used the online handle acidstorm, pleaded guilty last year to accessing protected computers to conduct fraud, disclosing illegally intercepted electronic communications, wire fraud and bank fraud. Schiefer was sentenced by United States District Judge A. Howard Matz, who also ordered the defendant to pay a $2,500 fine.

When he pleaded guilty, Schiefer admitted that he illegally accessed hundreds of thousands of computers in the United States and that he remotely controlled these compromised machines through computer servers. Once in control of the zombie computers, Schiefer used his botnets to search for vulnerabilities in other computers, intercept electronic communications and engage in identity theft.

In connection with the wiretapping scheme, Schiefer admitted that he and others installed malicious computer code, known as malware, on zombie computers that captured electronic communications as they were sent from users computers. Because victims with compromised computers did not know that their computers had become infected and were bots, they continued to use their computers to engage in commercial activities, such as making online purchases. Schiefers spybot malware allowed him to intercept communications sent between victims computers and financial institutions, such as PayPal. Schiefer sifted through those intercepted communications and mined usernames and passwords to accounts. Using the stolen usernames and passwords, Schiefer made purchases and transferred funds without the consent of the victims. Schiefer also gave the stolen usernames and passwords, as well as the wiretapped communications, to others. Schiefer is the first person in the nation to plead guilty to wiretapping charges in connection with the use of botnets.