Botnet builder gets almost four years in prison

The man who built the infrastructure for the Ebury botnet has received a 46-month prison sentence in the United States after pleading guilty to wire fraud and other computer crimes charges.

Forty one-year-old Russian Maxim Senakh was arrested by Finnish police for his role in the Ebury botnet and extradited to the US in January this year.

The US Department of Justice said Senakh supported the Ebury campaign by creating accounts with domain registrars to develop the botnet infrastructure.

According to the US DoJ, Senakh and an associate known only as "Silver Fox" [pdf] profited from running advertising click-fraud and spamming schemes via the botnet, to the tune of several millions of dollars.

Ebury is a rootkit that was used to attack Linux servers from 2008. It exploited a vulnerability in OpenSSH to steal user log in credentials to create a botnet of tens of thousands of infected servers globally.

It was also used to attack the Linux Foundation and the kernel.org developer site. Programmer Donald Ryan Austin was arrested in September last year for trying to install a rootkit on the Linux sites.