Virus seller arrested In the first prosecution of its kind in the nation, a well-known member of the "botmaster underground" has been indicted on federal charges for profiting from the use of "botnets" - armies of computers that are under the control of the botmaster and are used to launch destructive attacks or to send huge quantities of spam across the Internet. Jeanson James Ancheta, 20, of Downey, California, was arrested this morning by special agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ancheta was indicted yesterday in two separate conspiracies, as well as substantive charges of attempting to cause damage to protected computers, causing damage to computers used by the federal government in national defense, accessing protected computers without authorization to commit fraud and money laundering. The 17-count indictment alleges that Ancheta wrote malicious computer code, spread that code to assemble armies of infected computers, and sold access to the infected computers for the purpose of launching distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and sending spam. Ancheta also allegedly used the botnets to generate income from the surreptitious installation of adware on the infected computers.