14 DAY TRIAL // The US State Department announced that its Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) Rewards Program increased the reward for information leading to the apprehension of a Russian national suspected to have been the administrator of the GameOver Zeus botnet, to $3 / €2.6 million.
Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev was charged last year in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with conspiracy, computer hacking, wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering in connection with his alleged role as administrator of the GameOver Zeus (GOZ) botnet.
GOZ created a P2P botnet
According to the investigators, the malware used by Bogachev infected more than one million computers and was used to steal online banking account log-in information, being responsible for the theft of more than $100 / €88 million from businesses and consumers in the US and other countries.
GOZ banking Trojan was identified in September 2011 and was distributed through spam and phishing messages. Upon infecting a machine, it would connect to other compromised systems through the peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, thus creating a decentralized network that could be controlled from any infected device.
The suspect has been on the Cyber’s Most Wanted list from the FBI for quite some time, and at the moment he takes the top spot, followed by Nicolae Popescu, a Romanian fraudster who is wanted for posting fake announcements for selling high value goods on online markets; info leading to capturing the latter is rewarded with up to $1 million / €880,000.
Cybercriminal can be arrested outside Russia
Bogachev is known to reside in Russia, which has no formal extradition agreements with the US, but the suspect may be travelling to other countries and the current bounty is offered as an incentive to provide information if he is spotted outside the Russian territory.
“We are turning to the world again for assistance in locating Bogachev. While he is known to reside in Russia, he may travel. With this $3 million reward incentive, someone, somewhere may see him and let the authorities know his whereabouts,” said Joseph Demarest, FBI Assistant Director, in an official announcement on Tuesday.
Law enforcement, in collaboration with security companies in the private sector deployed Operation Tovar in June 2014 to take down the GameOver Zeus network of infected computers.
Because of the decentralized nature of the botnet, disrupting it was difficult and the risk existed for it to grow back.