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A US court sentenced Russian Oleg Koshkin to four years in prison for organizing the work of the Kelihos malware, which, among other things, was involved in stealing funds from bitcoin wallets.
According to the US Department of Justice, the defendant operated a “encryption” service for the botnet, which made it possible to hide it from antivirus programs and led to the infection of about hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.
Koshkin was arrested in California in September 2019, from that moment he was in custody. In the summer of 2021, a jury found him guilty of cybercrimes.
The Russian worked together with the “king of spam” Peter Levashov. The latter is accused in the US of running the network of large botnets Storm Worm, Waledac and Kelihos for 20 years.
Levashov was detained in Spain in 2017, in 2018 he was extradited to the United States. In July 2021, the court sentenced the “king of spam” to a 2.7-year sentence already served.
The Kelihos botnet first appeared in December 2010. It was used to send spam to Canadian pharmaceutical companies, carry out DDoS attacks, steal personal data and funds from bitcoin wallets. At its peak, there were about 110,000 devices on the network. In 2017, Kelihos ceased operations.
Recall that in early December, Google filed a lawsuit against the alleged creators of the Glupteba botnet, which infected more than a million Windows-based computers for hidden cryptocurrency mining.
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