Pavel Vrublevsky was released last week after spending 6 months in Lefortovo prison in Moscow, following his arrest in June of 2011 for organizing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the website of Assist, a competitor of his company, Chronopay.
A leading Russian online payment processing company, Chronopay processes almost half of all Visa and MasterCard online transactions in Russia and partners with such companies as Britain’s MoneyBookers, Spain’s Caixa Catalunya, the Deutsche Bank subsidiary Pago, and China’s Alipay.
The cyber-attack on the Assist website, which occurred in 2010, resulted in making online ticket purchases for Aeroflot airlines unavailable for several days. Vrublevsky hoped that Aeroflot would change their choice of payment processing provider in favor for Chronopay. Indeed, Aeroflot cancelled their agreement with Assist, but chose to work with Alfa Bank instead.
While serving time in jail, the businessman fully admitted his role in the event. But some experts believe that Gusev was behind Vrublevsky’s arrest. Others suggested that the arrest may have been part of a plan to gain control over Chronopay.
Chronopay was mentioned multiple times in research papers and investigations of several major cybercrimes, including music piracy, DNS changers, scareware, and fake pharmacy distribution networks. Igor Gusev, a former partner of Vrublevsky, claimed that Vrublevksy was also behind RedEye, a notorious organizer of spam, fake anti-viruses, and porno distribution networks.
The investigation is not over and the date of the trial has not been set. However, the defendant has many plans for the future. According to a recent interview with news agency RIA Novosti, Vrublevsky is looking forward to starting new businesses in the e-commerce and media fields.
