Minimum wage?
" $125,000 in profits that he earned over the eight-year period". If that were a full time job, that would be around $7.50 an hour. Who says crime doesn't pay?
A Russian coder who ran and franchised a dark web service that optimized malware and checked it against antivirus engines has pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy and one charge of aiding and abetting computer intrusion. Jurijs Martisevs was arrested while on a trip to Latvia and extradited to the US after the authorities …
I assume he will be sentenced to a US Federal prison, I assume that is better prison than his local prison?
I am sure that there would be a few state players wanting to bypass antivirus systems, If he is really good at what he does he will probably leave prison with a job offer.
All the badguys are Russian now. Get with the program.
Yessir. Proceding to join the chorus of howler monkeys throwing some dung in the shape of scary looking formulae which frankly make no f*** sense to me (*).
(*)I spent half of my MSc fighting with some rather temperamental phospororganic synthesis reactions. The experience is best described as being a pig trying to conquer a watermelon (with no tools to crack it). So maybe... I am a bit biased...
...where do these people come from?
Not from two countries which could not see eye to eye for the last 1000 years and where hunting the peasants from the other country was the favourite noblemen sport during the middle ages. ON BOTH SIDEs - they are both guilty of that, it is simply a matter which one as on top at the moment.
A Russian is more likely to call his child Ossama Bin Laden than Jurijs. In addition to that the family name which also uses non-Russian spelling.
"That is not a Russian name. More likely Latvian. The s at the end of Jurij is the giveaway."
Yes and no. It's a Russian name in a Latvian literation. He most certainly lived in Latvia and got Latvian documents.
Yuriy Martyshev would be an English way to spell his name.
Same goes for the other guy, Ruslans Bondars. He's also an ethnic Russian with Latvian ID. Most likely had a surname Bondarchuk (or Bondarenko) and shortened it to Bondar.
Although I'm wondering why the article calls them just Russians - usual convention is to refer to citizenship, not ethnicity, and in murkier cases elaborate it as "a Latvian of Russian ethnicity" or something like that.
Seems they could have beat this one with a smarter lawyer. Cover it with some sort of rhetoric about "testing" for "research purposes".
In reality this is no different from what thousands of IT security admins do every day. Something turns up so they test it against AV brand A, AV brand B, AV brand C, etc to see who picks it up.
Yeah, no doubt these clowns were grubby dirty. It just seems this sets a legal precedent that could negatively impact legitimate security researchers.