ChronoPay CEO Arrested for Ordering Cyber Attack Against Competitor

Pavel Vrublevsky, CEO and co-founder of ChronoPay, the largest payment processing company in Russia, was arrested on the suspicion of hiring a hacker to attack a rival company.

According to security researchers, Vrublevsky, 32, and his company are deeply involved in cyber crime. The Russian businessman is said to be behind one of the longest running rogue online pharmacy affiliate programs called Rx-Promotion.

Local media reports that Vrublevsky was arrested on June 23 as he arrived at Moscow's Sheremetievo airport from a trip to the Maldives.

He is being held without bail on charges resulting from ordering a distributed denial-of-service attack against the servers of a company called Assist.

ChronoPay was competing with Assist for a contract to process online ticket payments for Aeroflot, the largest Russian airline. According to Interfax, both Aeroflot and Assist, suffered losses amounting to 1 million rubles ($35,000) as a result of the attack.

The DDoS attack was meant to make Assist's system appear undependable during trial runs and sway Aeroflot's management towards ChronoPay. The airline ultimately opted for Alfa-Bank, a large Russian private bank.

Security researcher and journalist Brian Krebs reports that Vrublevsky previously fled the country after the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested a man named Igor Artimovich in connection with the DDoS attacks.

Artimovich, who is known online as a hacker named Engel, allegedly admitted that he was instructed and paid by Vrublevsky to launch the attack against Assist.

Documents leaked from ChronoPay last year after its network was compromised suggest that the company and its employees are involved in many cyber criminal operations including scareware distribution, rogue online pharmacies and music piracy.

ChronoPay is also said to be responsible for the recent scareware wave that hit Mac OS X users, accusations which the company publicly denies.