Pavel Vrublevsky Sentenced to 2.5 Years
Summary: Pavel Vrublevsky, owner of Russian payments firm ChronoPay, was sentenced to two and a half years in a Russian penal colony after being found guilty of hiring the Artimovich brothers in 2010 to use their Festi spam botnet against rival payments firm Assist. Prosecutors said the resulting outage prevented Aeroflot from selling tickets for several days at a cost of millions of dollars, and ChronoPay security chief Maxim Permyakov was said to have paid $20,000 to arrange the attack.
Key Takeaway: The Krebs piece argues the conviction is less a Russian crackdown than the outcome of roughly $1.5 million in bribes that rival Igor Gusev allegedly paid to politicians and law enforcement to secure the prosecution - a reminder that a competitor with enough money can turn the state's enforcement machinery against you.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
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