Three Estonian men have been handed a combined jail term of 11 years for their part in a global PC hijacking campaign which netted them at least $14m.
The perpetrators, Timur Gerassimenko, 35, Dmitri Jegorov, 37, and Konstantin Poltev, 31, were each handed sentences ranging from three to four years for a scheme which lasted from 2007 to 2011, according to AP.
Gerassimenko was ordered to forfeit $2.5m while Jegorov and Poltev were told to forfeit $1m each.
More than four million computers in over 100 countries across the globe were affected by the campaign, including 500,000 in the US alone, according to the original indictment – issued four years ago when the three, and another three co-conspirators, were arrested in Estonia.
A seventh man, a Russian national, was also charged at the time.
“These defendants gave new meaning to the term, ‘false advertising’,” Manhattan US attorney, Preet Bharara, said in a statement in 2011.
“As alleged, they were international cyber bandits who hijacked millions of computers at will and re-routed them to internet websites and advertisements of their own choosing – collecting millions in undeserved commissions for all the hijacked computer clicks and internet ads they fraudulently engineered.”
The scheme not only affected individuals, but also government and NASA computers and those belonging to non-profits, businesses and educational institutions.
It is believed that the attacks caused $65,000 worth of damage to NASA machines, as the malware installed prevented AV and other security updates from being placed on computers.
The crimes are also said to have cost Google hundreds of thousands of customers, as affected netizens switched to different search engines.
The three will apparently have to finish serving their sentences in Estonia – where they’re in jail for similar offenses – before being extradited to the United States.
As part of the arrests four years ago, federal agents froze the defendants’ bank accounts and disabled dozens of rogue DNS servers used in the fraud campaign.