Pyotr Levashov, AKA Severa, is tied to lots of cybercrimes

Apr 10, 2017 22:21 GMT  ·  By

A Russian programmer has been arrested in Spain for alleged involvement in multiple hacks, with some sources indicating that the arrest is tied to the hacks that disrupted the US elections last fall.

According to Spanish press reports, Pyotr Levashov was arrested on April 7 in Barcelona and is currently in custody.

One legal source told AFP that Levashov was the subject of an extradition request by the United States, but that request is still being examined by the Spanish national criminal court.

Spanish news website El Confidencial writes that Levanshov's arrest warrant was actually issued by US authorities in relation to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee which helped Donald Trump's campaign and ultimately paved the way towards the White House. This was also confirmed by Levashov's wife, who told RT (formerly Russia Today) that the arrest was indeed based on these allegations. Official sources, however, deny that this is the case and say the arrest was made in relation to large-scale hacking and nothing more. AFP, for instance, quotes an official saying that this situation was "not tied to anything involving allegations of Russian interference with the US election."

AKA Severa

Security experts have long written about Levashov, or - as he was better known among hackers - "Severa." He was the moderator for the spam subsection of multiple online communities, serving as the linchpin connecting virus writers with spam networks, as Brian Krebs writes.

Krebs adds a long list of crimes to Severa's name. For instance, he's number seven among the Top 10 Worst Spammers. He's also reportedly responsible for running multiple criminal ops that paid virus writers and spammers to install "fake antivirus" software. Severa is also allegedly behind the Waladec spam botnet which has infected tens of thousands of computers sending up to 1.5 billion spam messages per day.

The US case is currently under seal and the Department of Justice refused to provide any more information on the matter. An unnamed DoJ official told Reuters, however, that the arrest was made in a criminal matter without an apparent national security connection.