Fergie's Tech Blog

Three Hackers Jailed in Russia: 8 Years Each

Konstantin Kornakov writes on viruslist.com:

A court in the Saratov region of Russia has sentenced three cybercriminals to eight years in jail each for a spree of extortion attacks in 2003. The three hackers managed to steal up to $4 million from UK companies by means of blackmail. All three men pleaded guilty and faced up to fifteen years jail time for extortion and the use of malicious computer programs.

The criminal group consisted of a number of individuals from several Russian cities, including Saratov, St. Petersburg, Astrakhan and Pyatigorsk. In 2003 they decided to carry out attacks on websites of online bookmakers in the UK and demand a ransom. One prominent attack took place on the website of Canbet, a British-Australian betting venture. The gang carried out a distributed denial of service attack on Canbet’s website during an important sporting event, demanding a payment of $10,000. When Canbet refused to pay up, their site was blocked and the company lost up to $200,000 in business for each day the server was down.

After that Canbet decided to pay the ransom into a Latvian bank, but the attacks did not stop, so the company contacted the British National High-Tech Crime Unit. British officers then turned to their Russian colleagues, who carried out their own investigation and arrested two suspects in 2004, with two supposed masterminds of the gang still on the run. In 2005 a third man was arrested and the three men held faced charges in court. It is thought they managed to extort as much as $4 million from their victims, having carried out 54 attacks in 30 countries over six months. Now the three men, including 20-year old Ivan Maksakov from Saratov, who created the spyware module used in the attacks, will have to spend eight years in jail each following a joint effort by British and Russian agencies as well as Interpol.

posted by Fergie @ 10/04/2006 09:55:00 AM