Google has won a lawsuit filed against two Russian nationals in connection with the operation of a botnet called Glupteba, the company said last week.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York imposed monetary sanctions against the defendants and their U.S.-based legal counsel. The defendants have also been asked to pay Google’s attorney fees. The defendants’ move to press sanctions against Google was denied.
The development comes nearly a year after the tech giant took down the malware’s command-and-control infrastructure and initiated legal proceedings against Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov, who are said to have been in charge of running the illegal botnet.
The defendants, along with 15 others, have also been accused of using the malware to create a hacked network of devices to mine cryptocurrencies, harvest victims’ personal and financial data, and place disruptive ads.
Gluteba is distinguished from its botnet counterparts by the use of cryptocurrency blockchains as a command-and-control mechanism to withstand disruption. Per Google, the botnet approximately infected more than one million Windows computers worldwide.
images from Hacker News
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