Tag Archives: Festi

The Download on the DNC Hack

January 3, 2017

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been inundated with questions from readers asking why I haven’t written much about two stories that have consumed the news media of late: The alleged Russian hacking attacks against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and, more recently, the discovery of malware on a laptop at a Vermont power utility that has been attributed to Russian hacker groups. I’ve avoided covering these stories mainly because I don’t have any original reporting to add to them, and because I generally avoid chasing the story of the day — preferring instead to focus on producing original journalism on cybercrime and computer security.

Who Is the ‘Festi’ Botmaster?

June 13, 2012

Pavel Vrublevsky, the co-founder of Russian payment processor ChronoPay, is set to appear before a judge this week in a criminal case in which he is accused of hiring a botmaster to attack a competitor. Prosecutors believe that the man Vrublevsky hired in that attack was the curator of the Festi botnet, a spam-spewing machine that also has been implicated in a number of high-profile denial-of-service assaults.