The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a Russian cybercriminal received a prison sentence of eight years for his role in a botnet conspiracy that resulted in estimated losses of more than $100 million.
The Russian cybercriminal identified as Aleksandr Brovko, formerly of the Czech Republic, was involved in the sophisticated scheme to steal and traffic sensitive personal and financial information in the online criminal underground also known as the darknet.
According to court documents, Brovko was an active member of several elite online forums designed for Russian-speaking cybercriminals to gather and exchange their criminal tools and services. For over ten years, from 2007 to 2019, he worked closely with other cybercriminals to monetize the massive data they stole using botnets, which they released and infected computers.
Brovko was responsible for writing software scripts to parse botnet logs and performed extensive manual searches of the data and obtained easily monetized information, such as personally identifiable information and online banking credentials.
