USA Indicts Russian over Spam Botnet Operation

According to U.S. Department of Justice, a man from Russia detained in Spain in April this year faces accusation of destructive hacking offenses caused with running a botnet called Kelihos within one indictment which lists 8 counts of criminal acts by him and which one Connecticut-based federal jury handed down recently.

A Bridgeport-based grand jury indicted 36-yr-old Peter Yuryevich Levashov on April 20 accusing him of causing purposeful destruction of certain protected PC as also wire fraud besides committing more offenses.

In the week of April 17, DOJ declared it had started one operation for dismantling Kelihos that contained contaminated PCs having Windows OS running on them. This was following Spanish officials arresting Levashov when he with family toured Barcelona for holidaying.

Botnet Kelihos contains compromised PCs from across the world and they're innumerable in number.

According to the indictment, Levashov operated the Kelihos network-of-bots for many years for sending over 2,500 spam mails for 24-hrs each time to execute different criminal schemes such as password thefts, pump-and-dump penny stock scam, or malware dissemination like ransomware. Itnews.com posted this, April 24, 2017.

As per America's officials, Levashov felt great about his work while he canvassed the continuously growing improvement in his spam operations for which he quoted a price. Like if legal ads were to be spammed then the price was $200/m junk e-mails, while for phishing assaults and unlawful scams the rate was $500/m.

Moreover, for pump-and-dump stock scam Levashov wanted an advance of $5K-$10K and would take 5% of the revenues earned from artificial price hikes of stocks. The DOJ terminated Kelihos April 10.

RT the national media service of Russia reports that Levashov's arrest was associated with USA's conviction that Russian government embezzled with presidential election of 2016 in USA for steering the outcome in Donald Dump the Republican candidate's favor However, DOJ stated that Kelihos' instance wasn't tied to the election breach.

Levashov since a lengthy period-of-time is regarded as possibly being certain online character going by the handle Peter Severa. For many years he was named in the chart of the ten highly dangerous PC-spammers worldwide by the spam-tracking institute Spamhaus.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/26/2017