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U.S. prosecuting officer have charged Russian national Maxim Rudometov over his allege involvement in developing and distributing the infamous Redline word - stealing malware .
The charges were foretell as part of “ surgical process Magnus,”first reveal by the Dutch National Police on Monday . This years - in - the - make mathematical process saw external police enforcement agencies dismantle the infrastructure of Redline and Meta , two prolific malware strains that have been used to slip sensitive information from millions of people .
A complaint unsealed on Tuesday expose how a series of operational security — or “ opsec ” — errors led to the authority identifying Rudometov . According to the indictment , Rudometov used a Yandex email account known to jurisprudence enforcement to register accounts on Russian - speech hack forums , where he used a smattering of soubriquet that were reused across other platforms , including Skype and iCloud .
U.S. sanction say they were capable to recall files from Rudometov ’s iCloud accounting , include “ numerous file that were discover by antivirus engines as malware , including at least one that was … determined to be Redline . ”
Rudemetov allegedly also used one of his hacking monikers — “ ghacking ” — on VK ’s date site , according to the complaint .
After receiving a tip from an unnamed security firm in August 2021 , U.S. authorities obtained a search warranty to canvass the data found in one of the servers used by Redline , which provided additional information — including IP addresses and a Binance name and address registered to the same Yandex story — connect Rudometov to the development and deployment of the ill-famed infostealer .
“ Rudometov regularly accessed and managed the base of Redline infostealer , was link with various cryptocurrency accounts used to welcome and launder payments , and was in possession of Redline malware , ” the Department of Justice say on Tuesday . The complaint revealed that Redline had been used to taint zillion of computers around the world since February 2020 , including “ several hundred ” motorcar used by the U.S. Department of Defense .
It ’s not yet known if Rudometov has been arrested . If convicted , he faces up to 35 years in prison .
Europol and the Dutch police also revealed further information about Operation Magnus on Tuesday , indicating that three server were take offline in the Netherlands and two domain used for mastery and control surgical process by Redline and Meta were seized .
