A man from California has plead guilty to federal charges that he sold access to networks of compromised PCs and made money from illicitly installed adware. Jeanson James Ancheta is accused of using automated software to infect Windows systems and creating botnets, and then selling access to those botnets. It is also alleged that he used the botnets to acquire affiliate revenue from adware. This chap could be looking at a maximum of 25 years of prison time and fines of $1m.