US jails Russian hacker for 8 years over botnet, bank fraud

US jails Russian hacker for 8 years over botnet, bank fraud

The Russian hacker participated in a sophisticated scheme to steal and exchange sensitive financial and personal data, causing a loss of $100 million to the victims.

A Russian Programmer will spend eight years in a US jail for his role in a cybercriminal network that targeted their victims’ bank accounts for stealing money.


Reportedly, the hackers were able to steal approx. $100 million through the code written by Aleksandr Brovko that examined botnet logs for obtaining web banking credentials for the network.


Court documents revealed [PDF] that Brovko was a member of several “elite” online forums created especially for Russian-speaking cybercriminals to collect and share services and tools for conducting cybercrimes.


See: Russian hacker Aleksei Burkov jailed for 9 years in US


The Department of Justice’s Criminal Division’s Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt stated that for more than a decade, Brovko helped cyber criminals gain access to American targets’ private and financial information using his programming skills.


According to the DoJ’s press release, Brovko facilitated large-scale stealing of sensitive data between 2007 and 2019. He closely worked with threat actors to monetize huge data reserves stolen by botnets and wrote software scripts to “parse botnet logs.”


Furthermore, Brovko manually searched for data to extract information that could be monetized easily. This includes online banking credentials and personally identifiable information.

Brovko also verified the stolen credentials’ validity and assessed if the hacked financial accounts contained sufficient funds to conduct fraudulent t ..

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