Russian extradited to U.S. for hacks that stole 160M credit card numbers

[Audrey McNeil <audrey () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2885453/russian-extradited-to-us-for-hacks-that-stole-160m-credit-card-numbers.html

A Russian man accused of high-profile cyberattacks on Nasdaq, Dow Jones,
Heartland Payment Systems and 7-Eleven has been extradited to the U.S. and
appeared in court in Newark, New Jersey, Tuesday.

Vladimir Drinkman, 34, of Syktyykar and Moscow, Russia, was charged for his
alleged role in a data theft conspiracy that targeted major corporate
networks and stole more than 160 million credit card numbers, the U.S.
Department of Justice said in a press release. Drinkman was arrested in the
Netherlands in June 2012 and had been detained there.

Drinkman appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of New
Jersey and entered a plea of not guilty to 11 counts he faces. His trial is
scheduled to begin in April.

Drinkman was one of five people from Russia or the Ukraine indicted in July
2013 for allegedly conspiring to penetrate the computer networks of several
of the largest payment processing companies, retailers and financial
institutions in the world, the DOJ said.

The hackers often gained initial entry through an SQL injection attack, the
DOJ said. They then placed malware into the compromised networks that gave
them backdoor access. In some cases, the defendants lost access to a system
due to companies' security efforts, but were allegedly able to regain it
through persistent attacks.

Drinkman and his four codefendants each served specific roles in the
hacking scheme, according to court documents. Drinkman and Alexandr
Kalinin, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia, each allegedly specialized in
penetrating network security and gaining access to the corporate victims'
systems. Roman Kotov, 33, of Moscow, allegedly specialized in mining the
networks that Drinkman and Kalinin compromised to steal valuable data.

The hackers hid their activities using anonymous web-hosting services
provided by Mikhail Rytikov, 27, of Odessa, Ukraine. Dmitriy Smilianets,
31, of Moscow, then allegedly sold the stolen information and distributed
the proceeds of the scheme to the participants, the DOJ said.

Drinkman and Kalinin were previously charged in New Jersey as Hacker 1 and
Hacker 2 in a 2009 indictment charging Albert Gonzalez, 33, of Miami, in
connection with five corporate data breaches, including the breach of
Heartland Payment Systems, which at the time was the largest breach ever
reported. Gonzalez is currently serving 20 years in federal prison.

Kalinin is also charged in two federal indictments in the Southern District
of New York. One charges Kalinin in connection with hacking certain
computer servers used by Nasdaq and the second charges him and another
Russian hacker with an international scheme to steal bank account
information from U.S. financial institutions.

Drinkman and Smilianets were arrested at the request of the DOJ while
traveling in the Netherlands in June 2012. Smilianets was extradited in
September 2012 and remains in federal custody. Kalinin, Kotov and Rytikov
remain at large.

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