A mastermind behind the Bredolab Botnet was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison by an Armenian district court.
A 27-year-old Georgy Avanesov, a Russian citizen of Armenian descent, was arrested in 2010 for creating and spreading the Bredolab virus that infected an estimated 30 million computers around the world. The malware siphoned bank account passwords and other confidential information from infected computers.
Avanesov developed Bredolab in Armenia around March 2009 and used computer servers in Holland and France to spread the virus.
According to prosecutors, he earned about $125,000 a month renting out access to compromised computers in his botnet so that criminals could use them to spread other malware, send out spam, or use them to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Avanesov reportedly confessed to investigators that he had written Bredolab, but denied having any knowledge of its criminal usage. He simply made it available to others, he argued, without foreknowledge of how they planned to use it.
