The fall of a botnet hacker

How many spam emails can a botnet send in a day? How many servers does it take? Well, an Armenian Court has sentenced the creator of the Bredolab botnet, Georgiy Avanesov, to four years in prison, according to a report from the ARMENPRESS news agency. The 27 year of Russian man was found guilty of computer sabotage for starting a botnet operation in 2009 which was used to distribute denial-of-services attacks and for sending, get this, over 3.6 billion spam emails per day ( that's right, BILLION )!! The BBC estimates that Avanesov earned approximately €100,000 (£80,000) per month with Bredolab, also known as Oficla.

So how many servers were employed for this operation? In October of 2010, Dutch investigators were able to take control of the Brebolab botnet's 143 command & control servers and take them offline. The Dutch law enforcement authorities worked with security specialist Fox IT to track down Avanesov, which eventually led to his arrest at an airport in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. At the time it was running, the Bredolab trojan was estimated to have infected more than 30 million Windows PCs around the world and was capable of infecting three million new PCs a month through infected emails.