Oct 21, 2021
Two Eastern European nationals have been sentenced in the U.S. for offering "bulletproof hosting" services to cybercriminals, who used the technical infrastructure to distribute malware and attack financial institutions across the country between 2009 to 2015. Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia, and Aleksandr Shorodumov, 33, of Lithuania, have been each sentenced to 24 months and 48 months in prison, respectively, for their roles in the scheme. Court documents showed that both the individuals worked as administrators for an unnamed bulletproof hosting service provider that rented out IP addresses, servers, and domains to cybercriminal clients to disseminate malware such as Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel, and the Blackhole Exploit kit that were used to gain access to victims' machines, co-opt them to a botnet, and siphon banking credentials. The development comes months after Stassi and Shorodumov, along with the service's Russian founders Aleksandr Grichishkin and Andrei Skvort
