A Ukrainian national has pleaded guilty in the U.S. to his role in two different malware schemes, Zeus and IcedID, between May 2009 and February 2021.
Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov (aka Vyacheslav Igoravich Andreev, father, and tank), 37, was arrested by Swiss authorities in October 2022 and extradited to the U.S. last year. He was added to the FBI’s most-wanted list in 2012.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) described Penchukov as a “leader of two prolific malware groups” that infected thousands of computers with malware, leading to ransomware and the theft of millions of dollars.
They also used individuals residing in the U.S. and other parts of the world as “money mules” to receive the wired funds, which were ultimately funneled to overseas accounts controlled by Penchukov et al. A successor to Zeus was dismantled in 2014.
The defendant has also been accused of facilitating malicious activity by helping lead attacks involving the IcedID (aka BokBot) malware from at least November 2018. The malware is capable of acting as an information stealer and a loader for other payloads, such as ransomware.
Mark Sokolovsky, who was arrested by Dutch authorities in March 2022, leased Raccoon to other cybercriminals on a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model for $200 a month. It first became available in April 2019.
Sokolovsky’s arrest was accompanied by a coordinated takedown of Raccoon’s digital infrastructure, but a new version of the stealer, called RecordBreaker, has since emerged in the wild.
He has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and one count of aggravated identity theft.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/
