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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Who Is the ‘Festi’ Botmaster?

Summary: Russian prosecutors allege ChronoPay co-founder Pavel Vrublevsky hired a botmaster to attack competitor Assist during Aeroflot's payment-processing bidding, and the man arrested in that case, Igor Artimovich (handle "Engel"), confessed to using his botnet for the attack after receiving instructions and payment. Group-IB evidence given to the FSB tied Artimovich to control servers managing more than 10,000 infected PCs, and his Topol-Mailer botnet is more commonly known as Festi, one of the world's largest and most active spam botnets, which ESET also documented as a DDoS tool.

Why it matters: The same botnet was allegedly aimed at a payment processor over a single airline contract, and the case record includes a claim that a rival paid $50,000 to Russian officials to open a criminal investigation into Artimovich - so the threat here is a commercial dispute settled with 10,000 compromised machines and bought law enforcement.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

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Malware
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