Russian maker Gozi banking malware fined $6.9 million

28-year-old Russian Nikita Kuzmin, also known as ’76’, has been sentenced by a New York judge to pay a fine of $ 6.9 million, about 6 million euros. Kuzmin was the creator of the Gozi virus, which was developed to steal bank information.

Kuzmin had already been detained for 37 months before his conviction, the US Department of Justice reports. This fact was included in the determination of his sentence. It is believed that the virus he developed managed to infect about a million computers worldwide, causing millions of dollars in damage. The space agency NASA was also one of the victims of the virus.

The Russian had pleaded guilty in 2011, after agreeing to cooperate with US authorities. It is not clear how this collaboration went and what it yielded. Only a ‘substantial contribution’ was reported by the Public Prosecutor. In September 2015, a Latvian programmer by the name of Deniss Calovskis confessed that he was co-responsible for the development of the Gozi virus. He was arrested in 2012 and was sentenced on January 5 to 21 months in prison, which he already had behind him at that time.

The virus worked by infecting victims via a PDF file, after which it undetected collected banking information, such as usernames and passwords for internet banking. The intercepted data then forwarded the software to whoever had the virus in their hands. That could be different parties, because Kuzmin rented out the virus for a price of 500 dollars a week.

This had to be paid in the WebMoney currency, which is popular among internet criminals. The Russian had also developed so-called ‘web injects’, with which specific banks could be targeted. The US Justice Department assumes that Kuzmin earned about $250,000 by making the virus available to others.