Mr. Waledac: The Peter North of Spamming
Summary: Microsoft told a Virginia court that Andrey N. Sabelnikov, a St. Petersburg man who once worked at antivirus firm Agnitum, operated the Kelihos botnet, which infected an estimated 40,000 PCs. Researcher Brett Stone-Gross, who obtained the Kelihos source code, said Sabelnikov was likely only a developer and that the coordinator of both Kelihos and the earlier Waledac botnet was probably a Russian known as Peter Severa, who ranks #5 on Spamhaus's worst-spammer list and whose SpamIt records show $438,000 in revenue and $145,000 in commissions over three years.
Bottom line: Severa rented his botnet for $200 per million spam messages, $300 per million for money-mule scams and $500 per million for phishing, and Stone-Gross said operators are already seeding new Kelihos installers through pay-per-install affiliates to rebuild after takedowns.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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