an Armenian citizen, Georgy Avanesov, on the basis of being the suspected mastermind behind the botnet. The suspect denied any such involvement in the botnet. He was sentenced to four years in prison in May 2012. While the seizure of the command and control servers severely disrupted the botnet's ability to operate, the botnet itself is still partially intact, with command and control servers persisting in Russia and Kazakhstan. Security firm FireEye believes that a secondary group of botnet herders has taken over the remaining part of the botnet for their own purposes, possibly a previous client who reverse engineered parts of the original botnet creator's code. Even so, the group noted that the botnet's size and capacity has been severely reduced by the law enforcement intervention. References Web security exploits Multi-agent systems Distributed computing projects Spamming Botnets Cybercrime in India