New York: U.S. prosecutors have charged seven persons, including one Russian, in a massive internet fraud scheme in which more than four million computers across 100 countries, including those of U.S. government agencies and NASA, were infected with malicious software and $ 14 million were made through fake online advertising.
Six Estonian nationals Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorov, Valeri Aleksejev, Konstantin
Poltev and Anton Ivanov were arrested and taken into custody yesterday in Estonia.
The U.S. AttorneyÂ’s Office will seek their extradition to America. The seventh defendant, Andrey Taame, a Russian national, remains at large.
Each individual is charged with five counts of wire and computer intrusion crimes and faces up to 30 years in prison.
Terming the case the “tip of the Internet iceberg,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara said of the four million computers infected worldwide in the fraud, at least 500,000 were in the U.S. including computers belonging to agencies such as NASA, educational institutions, non-profit organisations and commercial businesses.
“These defendants gave new meaning to the term ‘false advertising.’ They were international cyber bandits who hijacked millions of computers at will and re-routed them to internet websites and advertisements of their own choosing —collecting millions in undeserved commissions for all the hijacked computer clicks and Internet ads they fraudulently engineered,” Bharara said.
According to the indictment, between 2007 and October 2011, the defendants used malware to secretly alter settings on infected computers and digitally hijacked internet searches.
The malware also prevented installation of anti-virus software and operating system updates on infected computers, leaving those computers and their users unable to detect or stop the defendantsÂ’ malware, and exposing them to attacks by other viruses.
Through the malware, the defendants redirected users searching for websites such as iTunes, Netflix and the U.S. Internal Revenue service to other sites.
When the user of an infected computer clicked on the domain name link for the official website of Apple-iTunes, the user was instead taken to a website for a business unaffiliated with Apple that purported to sell the technology companyÂ’s software.
Similarly when users searched for domain name link for Netflix or the IRS, they were instead taken to a website for an unrelated business.
The defendants made $14 million in illegitimate income through techniques like ‘Click Hijacking’ under which when the user of an infected computer clicked on a search result link displayed through a search engine query, the Malware caused the computer to be re-routed to a different website.
Each “click” triggered payment to the defendants under their advertising agreements.
U.S. authorities have seized computers at various locations, froze the defendants’ financial accounts, and disabled their network of U.S.-based computers—including dozens of rogue servers located in New York and Chicago.
Article source: http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/US_Charges_7_with_Internet_Fraud_that_Infected_4_Million_Computers-nid-97324-cid-2.html
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