Two Eastern Europeans Sentenced for Providing Bulletproof Hosting to Cyber Criminals

Two Japanese European nationals have been sentenced in the U.S. for providing “bulletproof hosting” providers to cybercriminals, who utilized the specialized infrastructure to distribute malware and attack financial establishments across the state between 2009 to 2015.

Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia, and Aleksandr Shorodumov, 33, of Lithuania, have been each individual sentenced to 24 months and 48 months in prison, respectively, for their roles in the scheme.

The enhancement comes months soon after Stassi and Shorodumov, alongside with Aleksandr Grichishkin and Andrei Skvortsov of Russia, pleaded guilty to Racketeer Affected Corrupt Group (RICO) charges before this May. The U.S. Justice Section (DoJ) claimed the other two co-defendants, Grichishkin and Skvortsov, are pending sentencing and facial area a maximum penalty of 20 years in jail.

Court paperwork confirmed that each the people today worked as administrators for an unnamed bulletproof hosting assistance supplier that rented out IP addresses, servers, and domains to cybercriminal clientele to disseminate malware these types of as Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel, and the Blackhole Exploit package that ended up made use of to obtain obtain to victims’ equipment, co-decide them to a botnet, and siphon banking credentials.

The cyberattacks aimed at U.S. providers and monetary institutions among 2009 and 2015 is considered to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses to victims.

In addition, the defendants also assisted their customers anonymize their felony activity from law enforcement by monitoring web-sites used to blocklist complex infrastructure and then moved the flagged articles to a new infrastructure that was registered less than untrue or stolen identities in a deliberate try to make it harder to observe.

“Cybercrime provides a really serious and persistent risk to the U.S., and these prosecutions send out a crystal clear concept that ‘bulletproof hosters’ who purposely support other cybercriminals are liable, and will be held accountable, for the harms their criminal consumers cause within our borders,” claimed Assistant Legal professional Common Kenneth A. Well mannered Jr. of the Justice Department’s Prison Division in a assertion.

Found this posting appealing? Follow THN on Facebook, Twitter  and LinkedIn to browse a lot more exclusive content material we write-up.

Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com