Russian hacker jailed over botnet data scraping scheme that drained victim bank accounts
A Russian cybercriminal has been jailed for eight years for participating in a botnet scheme that caused at least $100 million in financial damage.
According to the US Department of Justice (DoJ), Aleksandr Brovko was an active member of "several elite, online forums designed for Russian-speaking cybercriminals to gather and exchange their criminal tools and services." The 36-year-old, formerly of the Czech Republic, worked with other cybercriminals to scrape information gathered by botnets.
Brovko wrote scripts able to parse log data from botnet sources and then searched these data dumps to uncover personally identifiable information (PII) and account credentials. Any account credentials logged by Brovko's code would then be verified by the Russian national -- sometimes manually -- to see if it was "worthwhile" using the accounts to conduct fraudulent transactions, prosecutors say. If so, bank accounts would be pillaged by other threat actors and drained of funds.
