Hacker gets 30 months for botnet that hit 72,000 PCs

Joshua Schichtel on Thursday received a 30-month prison sentence after pleading guilty last year to creating a botnet that infected 72,000 computers.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 30-year-old Schichtel sold access to botnets, which are networks of thousands of malware-infected computers, to scammers, who would contact Schichtel and pay him to install the malware on computers that comprised the botnet.