A hacker controlled 30 million computers

A court in Armenia last week condemned the young Russian Georgiv Avanesov to serving four years in prison for infecting millions of machines.

It is estimated that at the height of his crime, his network of "botnets" , as known to the "zombie computers" infected by certain viruses that allow the offender to control them and use them to infomáticos attacks and scams, they came to send some 3,600 million spam messages a day.

Computer rental

According to research, driven by the Russian authorities and Dutch criminal activity revolved around the Trojan virus known as Bredolab.

This virus is spread by hacking into certain pages such as Facebook, Skype and Amazon, through which the user received a malicious email attachment below that, when opened, infects your computer, a trick known as phishing .

After controlling the apparatus, the hacker rented part of his botnet to a third party who used them for his own crime committed. It was not until 2009 that the authorities began to be aware of the dimension of Bredolab and took a year to the Dutch police seize over 143 servers in that country, which is used to control millions of computers centrally.

Soon after, Avanesov was arrested at Yerevan airport in Armenia, where he was tried and sentenced to four years this week. The sentence was considered historic Armenia, since the country had never before imposed a prison sentence to a cybercriminal.

As said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos Computer Security Center, the business benefits Avanesov allowed to live a wild lifestyle, with "jet travel to the Seychelles with his girlfriend."

The czar spam

Not the first time that the authorities of a country condemning the activities of a young "spam czar." This is the nickname with which he met Oleg Nikolaenko, a Russian citizen of 25 years from 2010 being held in a U.S. prison awaiting trial.

Authorities charged Nikolaenko to become responsible for one third of all spam in circulation through the network of botnets Mega-D.

Russia is regarded by security experts a "cradle" of young hackers, due to an educational system that emphasizes the teaching of engineering and mathematics, but whose labor market offers opportunities for new generations of IT talent.

For this reason, it is believed that young Nikolaenko Avanesov and are tempted to participate in this type of illegal Internet business, which according to security firm Symantec annually generate about 114,000 million.

Source in Spanish.