Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder and main owner of electronic payment company ChronoPay, was sentenced to 2.5 years in jail for orchestrating a cyber attack on a competitor. This conviction is the result of a two-year legal imbroglio that some feel has been plagued with procedural infringements and bias.
The Tushinsky Court of Moscow ruled last week that in July 2010 Vrublevsky committed a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the website of Assist.
Assist is a Russian payment company that had vied with ChronoPay for a lucrative e-ticketing contract with Aeroflot, Russia’s largest air carrier. Vrublevsky hired an ex KGB officer to plan the attack and two hackers to complete it for $20,000, the court found.
This manoeuver cost Assist and its partner VTB24 a canceled contract with the air carrier and both Assist and Aeroflot a combined $5 million in damages resulting from a disruption of online payments for the carrier’s air tickets.
The hackers, the Artimovich brothers, were also jailed for 2.5 years each, while the former security officer, Permyakov, the only of the four to have pleaded guilty, was put on two-year probation.
Justice Russian style
If the case was clear for the judge and the prosecution, it was not so for Vrublevsky’s defense and independent analysts.
The first chapter in this protracted legal saga began almost a year after the attack. The prominent Russian Internet businessman was arrested in June 2011 and spent the next six months in prison. He was suddenly released around Christmas that year with the stipulation that he could not leave Moscow, pending further investigation.
In June 2013, Vrublevsky was once again taken into custody for “putting pressure on witnesses.” In an exchange with opposition-minded newspaper Novaya Gazeta, his lawyers claimed they had found out that the court decision followed a complaint from a biased witness, a friend of the law enforcement officer who had investigated the DDoS case in 2011. A recent handwriting examination has proved the falsification of the witness’s signature in the case, Novaya wrote.
The Moscow City Court disregarded the fact and upheld Vrublevsky’s apprehension.
In addition to faking signatures, Russia’s law enforcement hacked a U.S.-based Facebook server two months ago to access Vrublevsky’s correspondence in that social network, Novaya discovered. Also, experts have reportedly proven that the Topol-Mailer, the computer virus the prosecution asserted was instrumental in the Aeroflot attack, was developed only in September 2010, which was two months after the DDoS attack.
The defense claims that the Vrublevsky and the Artimovich brothers were framed and that police malpractice was present in the attack.
Some analysts, such as Novaya Gazeta, believe that with the latest conviction Russia’s secret services have taken vengeance on Vrublevsky, a talented IT businessman, for his refusal to facilitate illegal financial transaction involving law enforcement officials. Others feel that it may have been part of a plan to gain control over ChronoPay.
