Fake News at Work in Spam Kingpin’s Arrest?
Summary: Spanish authorities arrested 36-year-old Peter "Severa" Levashov, alleged creator of the Storm worm and the Waledac and Kelihos spam botnets, and RT.com led its coverage with his wife Maria's claim that he was detained over suspected hacking tied to the 2016 U.S. election. The U.S. Justice Department said Levashov played no role in Russian government hacking of the 2016 election, and the Kelihos botnet's documented election association was a 2012 Russian election campaign that emailed fake stories about candidate Mikhail D. Prokhorov.
Why it matters: Western outlets repeated RT's election-hacking angle while back-benching the actual capture of one of the world's most-wanted spammers, which Krebs describes as an unqualified success for the Kremlin's effort to make the press look unreliable and sow doubt about democratic process.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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