Computerworld: Man pleads guilty to using hack, pump-and-dump botnet

“James Bragg, 41, faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for orchestrating the hacking and spamming portions of the scheme, which ran between November 2007 and February 2009….

Bragg used a Russian botnet operator, named only as B.T. in court documents, to send the spam and to access hacked brokerage accounts and buy the penny stocks without the victim’s knowledge.”