The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that Oleg Koshkin, 41, a Russian national was sentenced today to 4 years in prison for operating a "crypting" service used to conceal the Kelihos malware from antivirus software. The DOJ says Koshkin enabled hackers to "systematically infect hundreds of thousands of victim computers around the world."
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Assistant Attorney General, Kenneth Polite, says the defendant provided a "critical service" used by cybercriminals to evade one of the first lines of cybersecurity defense, antivirus software. Polite added:
"Cybercriminals depend on services like these to infect computers around the world with malware, including ransomware."
The DOJ noted that Koshkin and his co-conspirators knew that their services could be used for malware such as botnets, remote access trojans, keyloggers, credential stealers, and cryptocurrency miners. Particularly, Koshkin worked with Peter Levashov, the operator of the Kelihos botnet, to develop a system that would allow Levashov to crypt the Kelihos malware multiple times each day.
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