A Romanian national who operated a bulletproof hosting service used by trojans such as Gozi, Zeus, and SpyEye was sentenced to three years in prison in the United States.
The man, Mihai Ionut Paunescu, 39, a dual Romanian and Latvian national, also known under the online moniker ‘Virus’, was arrested in Colombia in 2021 and was extradited to the US last year. He pleaded guilty in court in February 2023.
The bulletproof hosting service operated by Paunescu provided cybercriminals with the infrastructure needed to distribute malware and spam without fear of detection by law enforcement.
To facilitate the malicious activities, Paunescu rented servers and IP addresses from legitimate providers and then rented them to cybercriminals.
He also provided cybercriminals with servers they could use as command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, monitored the IPs to determine if they were marked as suspicious or untrustworthy, and relocated customer data to new infrastructure when blocked.
Paunescu provided such services to the operators of Gozi Virus, which infected more than one million computers worldwide, stealing victims’ bank account information, including usernames and passwords, and causing tens of millions of dollars in losses.
Similarly, the Zeus and SpyEye trojans were used to steal confidential financial information from the infected machines.
The bulletproof hosting service was also used by BlackEnergy, a Russia-linked piece of malware used in numerous attacks against government organizations and power grids in Ukraine, and against critical infrastructure companies in the United States.
Upon delivering the sentence, the judge said that Paunescu “made considerable money” from facilitating the distribution of “some of the most serious malware circulating at the time”.
In addition to the prison sentence, Paunescu was ordered to forfeit $3.5 million and pay roughly $19,000 in restitution.
In 2016, Gozi creator Nikita Kuzmin was sentenced to time served after spending three years in custody and helping investigators, and SpyEye creator Aleksandr Panin was sentenced to nine years in prison. Hamza Bendelladj, an Algerian national who helped advertise and distribute SpyEye, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
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