Russian TrickBot Gang Hacker Extradited to U.S. Charged with Cybercrime

A Russian national, who was arrested in South Korea final month and extradited to the U.S. on October 20, appeared in a federal court in the state of Ohio on Thursday to confront fees for his alleged part as a member of the notorious TrickBot team.

Courtroom files showed that Vladimir Dunaev, 28, along with other customers of the transnational, cybercriminal business, stole revenue and confidential information and facts from unsuspecting victims, which includes folks, economical establishments, faculty districts, utility organizations, governing administration entities, and non-public companies.

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Setting up its roots as a banking trojan in 2016, TrickBot has advanced into a modular, multi-phase Windows-primarily based crimeware resolution able of pilfering worthwhile personalized and monetary data, and even dropping ransomware and write-up-exploitation toolkits on compromised units. The malware is also infamous for its resilience, owning survived at minimum two takedowns spearheaded by Microsoft and the U.S. Cyber Command a calendar year in the past.

Even so, on the legal entrance, the U.S. federal government before this yr billed a 55-yr-old Latvian girl, named Alla Witte, who the prosecutors stated worked as a programmer “overseeing the creation of code associated to the monitoring and tracking of approved end users of the Trickbot malware.” Dunaev is the 2nd Trickbot defendant to be arrested in 2021.

Dunaev, especially, is mentioned to have worked as a developer for the team, in demand of building, deploying, and handling the Trickbot malware starting in November 2015, when also overseeing the malware’s execution, as nicely as planning Firefox web browser modifications and aiding to conceal the malware from detection by security software package.

In early September, South Korean media outlets described the arrest of Dunaev (then determined only as “Mr. A”) at the Incheon Worldwide Airport when trying to depart for Russia immediately after remaining stranded in the region for around a year owing to COVID-19. The suspect, who arrived in February 2020, also experienced his passport expired in the interim period, forcing him to remain in a resort even though his passport was re-issued.

But once the passport was changed, the defendant tried to depart for his indigenous residence in Russia, primary to his arrest pursuant to an extradition request from the U.S. Dunaev has been billed with conspiracy to commit personal computer fraud and aggravated identification theft, conspiracy to commit wire and lender fraud, conspiracy to commit dollars laundering, and multiple counts of wire fraud, lender fraud, and aggravated identification theft.

If identified guilty on all counts, the defendant faces a whole prison time period of 60 years.

“Trickbot attacked firms and victims across the globe and infected millions of pcs for theft and ransom, together with networks of educational institutions, banks, municipal governments, and companies in the overall health care, energy, and agriculture sectors,” stated Deputy Lawyer Standard Lisa O. Monaco in a assertion.

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