Published on: July 17, 2024
The US Department of Justice recently sentenced a criminal responsible for orchestrating the notorious Zeus and IcedID malware operations.
The man behind the attacks is Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov, a 37-year-old Ukrainian national who had been pursued by law enforcement agencies for over a decade before his eventual capture. Once he was arrested, he was extradited to the US, where he faced trial.
Online criminal circles knew him as his online alias, “Tank.”
They found him thanks to his online chat history, where he had shared personal information about his daughter, including her name, height, and weight. Ukrainian police were able to quickly track him down with this data.
His associates had been arrested in 2015, however he kept bouncing from crime to crime and conducting increasingly more complex malware-related schemes. Recently, he disseminated a banking trojan known as Bokbot across the internet, stealing from any victims who became infected. This was a part of the overall IcedID campaign.
A banking trojan is a form of malware that lingers on your device and collects sensitive data, such as banking credentials and personal data while you use your web browser. After stealing the data, it transmits it back to the host, who can then either use your data maliciously or sell it online.
The IcedID malware campaign isn’t the first one that PenchukovIn was associated with. Back in 2012, law enforcement agencies discovered the actor after he was caught playing a pivotal role in the JabberZeus crime gang. This operation saw hackers attacking small to medium-sized businesses using the Zeus banking trojan, the same one used in the IcedID campaign.
For a while, he was even on the FBI’s most wanted list.
He was sentenced to nine years in prison, with three years of supervised release. On top of that, the courts are demanding that he pay $73 million in restitution.