Ukrainian law enforcement authorities on Monday disclosed the arrest of a hacker responsible for the creation and management of a "powerful botnet" consisting of over 100,000 enslaved devices that was used to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and spam attacks on behalf of paid customers.
As the SBU cyber specialists managed to establish, the attacker turned out to be a resident of Ivano-Frankivsk region. is also said to have leveraged the automated network to detect vulnerabilities in websites and break into them as well as stage brute-force attacks in order to guess email passwords. In addition to cyberattacks and hacking, he picked up passwords for e-mail boxes on remote platforms, the so-called "brute force".
The Ukrainian police agency said it has conducted a raid of the suspect's residence and seized their computer equipment as evidence of illegal activity.
The Security service of Ukrain SSU said in a press statement ( He found customers on closed forums and in Telegram chats, and made payments to "customers" through electronic payment systems banned in Ukraine. At the same time, according to the investigation, the Prykarpattia resident is a representative of the Russian electronic system of instant payments Webmoney, which is subject to the sanctions of the National Security and Defense Council. ) The payments were facilitated via WebMoney, a Russian money transfer platform banned in Ukraine.
The type of development comes weeks after Russian cybersecurity firm Rostelecom-Solar, a subsidiary of the telecom operator Rostelecom, disclosed late last month that it had sinkholed a portion of the Mēris DDoS botnet that's known to have co-opted an estimated 250,000 hosts into its mesh.
NKTsKI and Rostelecom-Solar prevent the Meris botnet from hijacking more than 45,000 devices
