Why Were the Russians So Set Against This Hacker Being Extradited?
Summary: The Russian government spent four years fighting to stop Israel from extraditing 29-year-old Aleksei Burkov to the United States, and when that failed it imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on drug charges in a failed prisoner trade. Prosecutors say Burkov ran the CardPlanet carding forum that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards, while reporting ties his alias K0pa to co-administrator roles on the Mazafaka and DirectConnection forums, a blacklist staff job at Verified, and the FraudCrew botnet anonymity service.
Why it matters: Burkov sat atop forums whose members included Peter Levashov, Vladislav Horohorin and Sergey Kozerev, and he was in regular contact with the JabberZeus crew that worked with ZeuS author Evgeniy Bogachev, who carries a $3 million FBI bounty. Russia's willingness to jail an Israeli woman for seven years to keep him from talking is the measure of how much one arrested administrator can expose.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
- Related
- TSMC employee data breach linked to cloud provider Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026Data Breach at La Poste Subsidiary Maileva Affects 22 Million People in France Cyber Risks · Nov 15, 2026City of Osaka warns of data breach impacting 1 million as Japan reels from dozens of cyber incidents Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026