Dutch Botnet hackers sentenced.

Two Dutch hackers have been given jail sentences for infecting millions of Windows PCs with malware, and stealing personal information such as credit card details to purchase iPods, digital cameras and games consoles. The 20-year old leader of the hacking gang has been sentenced to two years in prison and his 28-year old accomplice received an 18 month jail term. They have also been fined 9,000 and 4,000 Euros respectively by the court in the town Breda in the Netherlands. Prosecutors claimed that the men ran one of the largest networks of infected computers ever uncovered, which included PCs around the world. Such zombie networks, also known as botnets, are often used to launch distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) or to launch spam campaigns. The two men used the W32/Codbot or Backdoor.CXJ to take remote control of innocent users' PCs between June and October 2005, with some versions of the malware capturing keypresses, in an attempt to commit identity fraud by stealing bank account information and credit card numbers. Several other suspects in the case are still awaiting sentencing. It's time that we see these kind of convictions however I know several people who wanted to sentence these men much heavier. Was this sentence really hard enough for them?