US indicts leader of Qakbot botnet linked to ransomware attacks
Rustam Rafailevich Gallyamov, a Russian national, has been charged by the U.S. authorities with being the mastermind of the Qakbot botnet malware operation, which infected over 700,000 computers and made ransomware attacks possible.
According to court filings, Gallyamov began working on Qakbot (also referred to as Pinkslipbot and Qbot) in 2008 and used it to infect thousands of computers.
Over time, a group of coders came together around Qakbot, but according to the indictment, Gallyamov was also in charge of creating other viruses. For over ten years, Gallyamov employed Qakbot as a banking trojan that could record keystrokes and function as a worm, malware dropper, or backdoor.
Beginning in 2019, a number of ransomware assaults by notorious gangs, including Conti, ProLock, Egreg...