Category Archives: citadel

Author of Citadel malware, used to steal $500 million from bank accounts, pleads guilty

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The Russian author of the notorious Citadel malware which infected over 11 million PCs and stole an astonishing $500 million from bank accounts has pleaded guilty to his crimes.
Read more in my article on the Tripwire State of Security blog.
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Russian hacker pleads guilty in U.S. for role in Citadel malware

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The hacker known as Kolypto plead guilty in an Atlanta court room on Monday to a charge of computer fraud after reaching a deal with federal prosecutors who agreed to seek no more than five years in prison for the crime. Mark Vartanyan, 29, was arrested in Norway in 2014 and extradited to the United States in Dec. 2016. Although he pleaded not guilty last week, Vartanyan took a deal just four days later, the Associated Press reports. Citadel malware was described in its heyday as a “state-of-the-art toolkit to both distribute malware and manage infected computers” by security firm Malwarebytes. The malware’s own tagline boasted it was a “universal spyware system.” Citadel launched in 2011 on Russian invite-only hacker forums and gained widespread popularity, promising to steal financial information from infected computers. It’s estimated to have cost $500 million in losses on 11 million infected machines over a three year period. In […]

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