Estonian hacker Pavel Tsurkan pleads guilty for operating a proxy botnet.

Estonian hacker Pavel Tsurkan has pleaded guilty in a United States court to the counts of computer fraud and of creating and operating a proxy botnet.

The Estonian national Pavel Tsurkan has pleaded guilty in a United States court to two counts of computer fraud and abuse.

According to court documents, Pavel Tsurkan (33) operated a criminal proxy botnet composed of more than 1,000 devices. The IoT botnet was tracked as the “Russian2015” because it was using the domain Russian2015.ru.

The infected devices were acting as a proxy to transmit third-party internet traffic, then operators were offering it for rent to threat actors that used it to conduct multiple malicious activities.

“He then sold access to global cybercriminals who channeled their traffic through the victims’ home routers, using the victims’ devices to engage in spam campaigns and other criminal activity. The Alaska victims experienced significant data overages even when there were no home computers connected to the victims’ home networks. The data overages resulted in hundreds to thousands of dollars per victim.” reads the press release published by DoJ.

The hacker compromised more than 1,000 computers and routers worldwide, DoJ reported that at least 60 victims are in Alaska.

“Today’s cybercriminals rely on increasingly sophisticated techniques to hijack computers and personal electronic devices for their criminal activities. Botnets like the ‘Russian2015’ are a dangerous threat to all Americans and today’s guilty plea demonstrates we can and will hold accountable foreign cybercriminals and their enablers,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Bryan Wilson, District of Alaska. “Our success in disrupting this botnet was the result of a strong partnership between private industry experts and law enforcement.”

The man will be sentenced on November 10, 2021, he faces up to 10 years in prison.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, cybercrime)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.