07-20-2018, 06:20 PM
If your business is spamming and computer fraud, be careful about where you vacation.
from the Hartford Courant
Quote:Spain on Friday turned over notorious Russian computer hacker Peter Yuryevich Levashov to FBI cyber detectives in New Haven, who have accused him of developing the Kelihos network of hundreds of thousands of infected computers and using it to stuff inboxes with spam, steal secret financial data and spew malicious programming around the world.
The Justice Department calls Levashov, who also is known on the Internet as Peter Severa and Peter of the North, “one of the world’s most notorious criminal spammers.” Russian media has tied him to efforts to influence U.S. elections, but there has been no confirmation of that, and he is not charged with election meddling in the terse federal indictment returned against him in Connecticut in April.
Levashov, 36, was arrested by Spanish authorities in April while vacationing with his family in Barcelona. Spanish authorities put him on a plane to the U.S. and turned him over to the FBI Friday morning. He landed in New York Friday afternoon.
The indictment and arrest are the result of intense efforts by FBI cyber crime squads in New Haven and Anchorage, Alaska. Federal authorities in Alaska shut down Levashov’s Kelihos botnet and are pursing him civilly. The U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven, which recently created a multi-agency computer crime task force, is bringing the criminal prosecution.
from the Hartford Courant
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.