A hacker who controlled a botnet of 72,000 computers and rented out command-and-control access to various malcontents was sentenced to 30 months in prison today, the Department of Justice said.

Joshua Schichtel, 30, of Phoenix, Ariz., pleaded guilty in August of last year to one count of "attempting to cause damage to multiple computers without authorization by the transmission of programs, codes, or commands, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," the DOJ said. Schichtel sold botnet access to various individuals who paid to have him install malware on victims' computers. Although the DOJ said multiple people paid Schichtel to install malware on computers, he pleaded guilty to a charge involving one customer who paid $1,500 to have malware installed on 72,000 computers.

A charge filed last year against Schichtel in US District Court in Washington, DC, says his alleged crime occurred on or around Nov. 20, 2009, in the DC Area. The court document and the DOJ announcement don’t contain many details on the crime that put him behind bars, but Schichtel’s history with the law goes back some time.

Schichtel was also named in a 2004 complaint in which he and four other defendants were charged with conspiring to use thousands of infected computers to launch Distributed Denial of Service attacks against e-commerce websites. The charges against Schichtel and several of his alleged conspirators were dismissed because the government’s deadline to obtain an indictment passed, O’Reilly reported at the time.

A guilty plea was entered by one of the alleged conspirators in that earlier case, but Schichtel seems to have avoided further charges until this latest incident put him behind bars.