25 May 2012, 15:12

Botnet operator sentenced to four years in prison

Botnet icon An Armenian court has sentenced the creator of the Bredolab botnet, Georgiy Avanesov, to four years in prison, according to a report from the ARMENPRESS news agency. The 27-year-old Russian man, who was found guilty of computer sabotage, started operating the botnet in 2009 and used it for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and for sending over 3.6 billion spam email messages per day. The BBC estimates that Avanesov earned approximately €100,000 (£80,000) per month with Bredolab, also known as Oficla.

In October 2010, Dutch investigators were able to take control of the Bredolab botnet's 143 command & control servers and take them offline. The Dutch law enforcement authorities worked with security specialist Fox IT to track down Avanesov, which eventually led to his arrest at an airport in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. At the time it was running, the Bredolab trojan was estimated to have infected more than 30 million Windows PCs around the world and was capable of infecting three million new PCs a month through infected emails.

(crve)

« previous | next »

Print Version | Send by email | Permalink: http://h-online.com/-1584497