Greetings from the eCrime conference in London. This conference is mostly meant for people working with law enforcement and in the financial industry and focuses on how to fight fraud and electronic crime.
Yesterday at the conference I had a chance to meet Anton Aleksandrovich Pakhomov. He works as a public prosecutor in the Saratov Regional Prosecutor's Office in Russia.
Mr. Pakhamov worked as a prosecutor on a case against denial-of-service extortionists. The case involved a large botnet that was used to attack webshops and gambling operators in UK and in USA. Targeted companies were forced to pay a ransom to get their sites back online. The ring earned several million dollars before they were caught.
The case involved 10 persons in Latvia (money mules) and four attackers from Russia and two from Kazakhstan. Out of these, three persons were successfully located and prosecuted in the city of Balakov in Russia. The whole investigation took more than a year, but in the end the three individuals were all sentenced. They got eight years of prison each.
So who were they? They were, from left to right, Alexander Petrov, Denis Stepanov and Ivan Maksakov.
