Romanian hacker faces US trial over virus-for-hire service - The Verge
The Department of Justice announced that it had extradited Mihai Ionut Paunescu, a Romanian hacker known as "Virus," to the US to face charges related to the distribution of the Gozi Virus banking Trojan and operation of a bulletproof hosting service used by cybercriminals.
Cybercrime may be a global industry — but that doesn’t mean criminals are immune from facing prosecution across borders.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced today that it had extradited dual Romanian / Latvian national Mihai Ionut Paunescu — known as “Virus” — to the US from Colombia for allegedly designing malware used to steal money from bank accounts across the world and operating the infrastructure used to distribute it.
Paunescu is alleged to be one of the creators of the Gozi Virus, a Trojan that infected millions of computers in countries including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Finland between 2007 to 2012. Distributed through corrupted PDF documents, the Gozi Virus captured banking login details and passwords from infected machines, allowing its creators to steal tens of millions of dollars from bank accounts around the world.
According to an indictment filed in 2013 in the Southern District Court of New York, Paunescu also ran a “bulletproof hosting” service that was rented out to other cybercriminals, providing servers that could be used for online criminal activity like distributing malware and controlling botnets while keeping the operators’ identities anonymous.
The indictment also claims that NASA was a victim of the malware, with one of the allegations stating:
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