Botnet operator jailed for four years in the United States for Bitcoin theft

A U.S. court sentenced Russian Oleg Koshkin to four years in prison for organizing the operation of the Kelihos malware, which among other things stole funds from Bitcoin wallets.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the convict ran a ‘crypting’ service for the botnet, which allowed it to evade antivirus software and led to infections on hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide.

Koshkin was arrested in California in September 2019, and has been in custody since. In the summer of 2021, a jury found him guilty of cybercrimes.

The Russian worked with the ‘spam king’ Peter Levashov. The latter is charged in the United States with running a network of major botnets—Storm Worm, Waledac and Kelihos—for two decades.

Levashov was detained in Spain in 2017 and extradited to the United States in 2018. In July 2021, a court sentenced the ‘spam king’ to a term of 2.7 years already served.

Kelihos first appeared in December 2010. It was used to send spam to Canadian pharmaceutical companies, conduct DDoS attacks, steal personal data and funds from Bitcoin wallets. At its peak, the botnet included about 110,000 devices. In 2017 Kelihos activity ceased.

Earlier in December, Google filed a lawsuit against the alleged creators of the Glupteba botnet, which infected more than a million Windows computers for covert cryptocurrency mining.

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