Estonia Endorses Deportation of 6 Alleged Cyber-criminals to USA

A recent judgment during the 2nd-week of February 2012 by the Estonia-based Harju County Court granted the country's authorities permission to deport 4 persons to the United States who were alleged to have committed crime on the Internet against PCs belonging to American users. Previously also, the court passed a same kind of verdict with regard to 2 other individuals, published balticbusinessnews.com dated February 21, 2012.

Currently, however, an ultimate pronouncement by the government of Estonia is expected once the court's verdict gets implemented.

In the meantime, during November 2011, the cyber-criminals' team head Vladimir Tshastshin, who designed the plan for carrying out the Internet fraud had police arrest him in Estonia via one huge collaboration between the Estonian agencies of law enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

It's alleged that Tshastshin created DNSChanger a certain PC virus that he used to infect 1m PCs across the globe. The infected PCs took end-users onto websites that fetched Tshastshin several million American dollars via the sites' advertisements.

Notably according to the FBI, the cyber-criminals, who earned money illegally with the help of malware, however, appeared efficient as well as operated like any conventional business. Their nature of dealings was somewhat complex, which thus far had not been observed or assessed.

Meanwhile, after the cyber-criminals were taken into custody, the FBI started deploying computer servers from its own reserve towards the substitution of the contaminated ones. But, according to one Security Company or more, that cleansing operation wasn't fast enough. Consequently, malicious computer servers, even before the arrests, had contaminated a few government agencies and numerous multinational companies, FBI's officials additionally remarked.

Indeed, Washington situated security firm, IID (Internet Identity) discovered clues about one or more computers becoming infected with DNSChanger out of 50% of the total Fortune 500 companies, as well as out of 27 prominent government agencies from a total of 55.

IID, while remarking about the malware's level of sophistication, stated that the malicious program's removal was fraught with challenges. For, it could disable anti-virus (AV) programs installed on the contaminated PCs that prevented in downloading Microsoft security updates.

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» SPAMfighter News - 2/28/2012