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Bredolab: Jail For Man Who Masterminded Botnet Of 30 Million Compute

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  • Bredolab: Jail For Man Who Masterminded Botnet Of 30 Million Compute

    BREDOLAB: JAIL FOR MAN WHO MASTERMINDED BOTNET OF 30 MILLION COMPUTERS
    Graham Cluley

    Naked Security
    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/05/23/bredolab-jail-botnet/
    May 23 2012

    A man who was in command of a botnet of some 30 million computers
    worldwide has been sentenced to four years jail in Armenia.

    According to prosecutors, Georg Avanesov was earning 100,000 Euros
    (£80,000 or $125,000) a month from hit Bredolab botnet business,
    renting out access to the compromised computers to criminals who wanted
    to send out spam, and spread malware and fake anti-virus attacks.

    The criminal income allowed the hacker to live a pretty lavish
    lifestyle by all reports, as he jetted off to the Seychelles with
    his attractive girlfriend and fancied himself as a DJ.

    At its peak, it is estimated that Avanesov's botnet was spewing out
    over 3 billion infected emails every day.

    Avanesov's comeuppance began in October 2010, when Dutch police
    announced that they had wrestled control of 143 Bredolab botnet command
    & control servers, and were using it to display a warning to infected
    computer users.

    The very next day, the botmaster was arrested by the authorities
    as he arrived on a late night flight from Moscow to Yerevan Airport
    in Armenia.

    Georg Avanesov - a Russian citizen of Armenian descent - didn't mind
    selling off access to his botnet, because he found it so easy to
    expand it by hijacking even more computers.

    Legitimate websites were hacked to spread malicious payloads that
    infected recruited visiting computers into the botnet, and further
    malware would be installed which stole usernames and passwords to
    FTP accounts. This would inevitably result in even more websites
    becoming infected.

    (There's an important lesson for website administrators to learn here.

    Don't tell your FTP software to remember your passwords, because if
    they are not held securely they could be scooped up by malware).

    Often, attacks designed to recruit new computers into the botnet
    would be spammed out. On occasion, the emails would pretend to come
    from the likes of Facebook, Skype and Amazon with an attached HTML
    file, luring users into clicking and being ultimately infected by a
    compromised third-party website.

    It's easy to imagine how some recipients would be easily tricked into
    clicking on attachments, even if it were out of curiousity.

    The botnet was also used to launch distributed denial-of-service
    attacks, effectively blasting websites off the net with the sheer
    amount of unwanted traffic sent to them from hijacked PCs.

    Of course, others were definitely involved in the Bredolab cybercrime
    operation, and we will have to wait and see if they are ever brought
    to justice.

    And it may not be the end of the story for Avanesov either - as it
    is possible that lawsuits may still be filed by overseas parties for
    the crimes that were committed worldwide.

    Lawyers defending Avanesov were quoted as claiming that their client
    "did not intend to deliberately harm anyone" with his activities,
    but clearly that argument didn't find much support at the district
    court in Yerevan which sentenced him to four years in jail for
    "computer sabotage".

    The judgment is something of a historic event in Armenia - as it is
    the first such computer crime-related sentence to be handed out in
    the country.

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