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ChronoPay chief sentenced to 30 months in prison for hacker attacks on Aeroflot

The court’s verdict said Vrublevsky decided to remove his company’s rival electronic payment system Assist and staged attacks on its web resources

Photo ITAR-TASS/Anton Novoderezhkin

Photo ITAR-TASS/Anton Novoderezhkin

MOSCOW, July 31 (Itar-Tass) - Moscow’s Tushino district court has sentenced the owner of Russian payments firm ChronoPay to 30 months in prison for plotting a hacker attack on online ticket sales of Russia’s flagship carrier Aeroflot, an Itar-Tass correspondent reported from a courtroom on Wednesday. Pavel Vryblevsky will serve his sentence in a general penitentiary. He was charged with illegal access to computer systems causing a huge financial loss and with creation, use and spread of "bot" infections.

The court’s verdict said Vrublevsky decided to remove his company’s rival electronic payment system Assist and staged attacks on its web resources to disrupt ticket sales.

Prosecutors demanded that Vrublevsky should be sentenced to three years in prison. The ChronoPay chief pleaded not guilty.

ChronoPay sought a contract with Aeroflot to act as intermediary in online ticket sales. At the beginning of July 2010, Vrublevsky instructed his company’s leading IT security expert Maxim Permyakov to hire IT experts brothers Igor and Dmitry Artimovich, who developed a "bot" network to carry out a hacker attack on Aeroflot’s website.

The Artimovich brothers made a DDoS denial of service attack on Assist’s website from their rented flat in Moscow in the period from July 15 to July 24, 2010. The computer attack blocked online ticket sales at Aeroflot’s website and inflicted damage worth 15 million roubles to Assist and 146 million roubles to Aeroflot.

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