By John Leyden for The Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
Ivan Maksakov of Balakovo, Alexander Petrov of Astrakhan, and
Denis Stepanov of St Petersburg extorted up to $4m from online
bookmakers and casinos in the UK alone prior to their capture,
Russian press agency RIA Novosti reports.
Prosecutors reckon they made 54 similar attacks across 30
countries during six months of high-profile attacks.
Maksakov and Stepanov were arrested in September 2004 following
a joint investigation by the UK's National High Tech Crime Unit,
Interpol, the FBI and Russia's Interior Ministry, and the
Prosecutor General's Office. Petrov was collared in the middle of
the following year. Each was charged with a number of computer
hacking and extortion offences under the the Russian Criminal Code
and convicted, resulting in unusually harsh sentences (by Russian
computer crime standards) that reflect the seriousness of their
crimes.
RIA Novosti reports that the modus-operandi of the attack
involved planting spyware, designed by 20-year-old Maksakov, onto
the systems of targeted firms. This was followed up by demands
that, unless the gang was paid off, a denial of service attack
would be launched against the websites of gambling firms.
"The web server of Canbet Sports Bookmakers Ltd, which refused
to pay a $10,000 ransom demand, was blocked during the Breeders'
Cup races, and the company lost more than $200,000 for each day of
downtime," public prosecutor Anton Pakhomov explained.
The trio were jailed during a sentencing hearing before a court
in the city of Balakovo in the Volga river Saratov region, 530
miles southeast of Moscow, on Tuesday.
© The Register
2006
