US Extradites Ukrainian Man for Using Botnet to Crack Thousands of Passwords
The US has charged a Ukrainian man for using an army of computers to help him crack thousands of login passwords each week.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had extradited 28-year-old Glib Oleksandr Ivanov-Tolpintsev for carrying out the hacking crimes. Ivanov-Tolpintsev allegedly operated a botnet, a collection of computers that were secretly taken over through malware. The various machines were then used to guess login passwords belonging to users across the globe.
“During the course of the conspiracy, Ivanov-Tolpintsev stated that his botnet was capable of decrypting the login credentials of at least 2,000 computers every week,” the DOJ says. The Ukrainian then allegedly sold the cracked passwords to cybercriminals through an unnamed online marketplace on the dark web that specialized in selling stolen login credentials. “Once sold on this website, credentials were used to facilitate a wide range of illegal activity, including tax fraud and ransomware attacks,” the Justice Department adds.
