U.S police force today arrested three criminals who are said to be involved in the uprising of one of the deadliest virus online i.e. the Gozi virus. The Gozi virus since 2005 has affected more than 40,000 computers in U.S. That belonged to many leading commercial and government centers, NASA is one of them. The attack was not only within U.S. but it was affected many foreign countries, which included Germany, Great Britain, Poland, France, Finland, Italy, Turkey and many others .The developers of virus gained a total of $50 million illegal profits through this activity.
The investigations upon this virus began about 2.5 years back. According to an official of FBI, this should be a ‘wake up’ call for all the people not only in U.S. but outside U.S. too. He also said:
“This case should serve as a wake-up call to banks and consumers alike because cybercrime remains one of the greatest threats we face, and it is not going away anytime soon,” Bharara the name of the official said. “It threatens individuals, businesses and governments alike.”
The official’s quoting are much to be concerned of as cyber criminals are really making the cyber world insecure But, coming back to the investigations upon this virus there has been masses of seizing of the computer by FBI and different countries. FBI has seized such a massive data that it would take many years to analyze it. Romania which is one of affected countries has also seized 250 terabytes of data and has handed it to FBI through closure 51 servers running in the country, a FBI official said:
That vast pile of data is almost certain to aid criminal investigation at FBI offices around the country as well as law enforcement agencies around the world,” he said. “It is more than standard boilerplate to say that this investigation is very much ongoing.
Coming to the suspects of this case who were namely: Nikita Kuzmin, Mihai Ionut Paunescu, Deniss Calovskis were of really young ages i.e. 25, 28 and 27 respectively. Kuzmin was the master mind behind all this and designed the virus over the years. He can be sentenced for a maximum of 95 years imprisonment by law. Paunescu and Calovskis were minor parts of this fraud and can be sentenced for 65 and 60 years respectively.
The law enforcement agencies also seized huge amount of cash from the criminals. Especially, from Calovskis from whom police seized $50,000 which he according to him was given to put additional features into the virus.
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