According to eWeek, a 26-year-old security consultant has admitted to installing code to assemble botnet armies of up to 250,000 infected computers that were used to steal user PayPal names, passwords and other personal and financial information.

In this, the first prosecution of its kind in the nation, John Schiefer will plead guilty to four felony counts: accessing protected computers to conduct fraud, disclosing illegally intercepted electronic communications, wire fraud and bank fraud.

In the botnet scams, Schiefer and several others developed and distributed malware to vulnerable computers. The code rendered the victimized systems into zombie computers that were then marshaled in armies of up to a quarter million strong and used to carry out a variety of identity theft scams. The scammers listened in on the compromised systems to intercept communications from their unwitting users to PayPal and other Web sites. With the PayPal user names and passwords in hand, they were able to get into victims’ bank accounts to make purchases.
Schiefer is facing a statutory maximum sentence of 60 years in federal prison and a fine of $1.75 million.