Man Convicted for Helping Hackers Beat Antivirus Products

A federal jury has bedevilled a Latvian hacker who was accused of running a malware testing service that helped numerous strains shell PC antivirus products.

Ruslans Bondars was convicted for designing and operating an infamous "online counter antivirus service," called Scan4you. The clandestine service let cybercriminals pay to anonymously test their malware confronting more 35 antivirus engines, and then tweak them to avoid detection.

Scan4you ran from at least 2009 to May 2022, when the FBI finally close information technology down and arrested 37-year-old Bondars and another suspect, Jurijs Martisevs, who were extradited to the U.s.a..

Prosecutors say at its elevation, Scan4you was the largest service of its kind, and helped cybercriminals inflict "hundreds of millions of dollars in losses" on The states companies and consumers.

For example, one customer used the service to test malware that ended upward stealing nearly 40 1000000 payment card numbers. Another customer relied on Scan4you to develop the "Citadel" malware strain, which infected eleven million computers, and resulted in over $500 million in fraud-related losses.

In a way, Scan4you was a counter to services similar VirusTotal, which too let anyone test malware against antivirus engines. The big difference with VirusTotal is that all data submitted to the service is shared with the rest of the Information technology security community, which can help tip off the public about computer threats.

"Hence, cybercriminals generally stay away from these services and opt to employ other 3rd-party services that practice not share any data with AV (antivirus) companies," said Trend Micro, a security firm that helped the FBI shut down Scan4you.

Scan4you had thousands of customers, but the service may have been a side-project for Bondars, a software developer by day who also dabbled in selling illegal prescription drugs through electronic mail spam and search engines, spreading cyberbanking malware, and running a website that sold stolen credit card information.

However, the Latvian was rather careless; he used his ain personal Gmail business relationship to help run his cyberbanking malware and let family members apply Scan4you'due south servers to host their personal websites.

Although Scan4you is no longer online, another shady malware testing service called VirusCheckMate remains up. But traffic to VirusCheckMate has been relatively flat since Scan4you went down, Tendency Micro said.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/news/21184/man-convicted-for-helping-hackers-beat-antivirus-products

Posted by: gonzalezplarecturs.blogspot.com

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