James Delahunty
29 Oct 2010 17:22
Dutch authorities announced earlier this week that a computer virus "mastermind" had been arrested in Armenia as part of a move against the spam-spewing Bredolab botnet.
Earlier this week, the High Tech Crime Team of the National Crime Squad in the Netherlands announced that 143 servers hosted by LeaseWeb were taken offline. It identified them as command and control servers for the Bredolab botnet, which at its strongest could infect 3 million computers a month and sent an estimated 3.6 billion spam e-mails a day.
"At the request of the national (Dutch) prosecution service, a 27-year-old Armenian believed to be the brains behind the notorious Bredolab network, was arrested at the Yerevan international airport last night," the prosecution service said in a statement in The Hague.
The Netherlands has no extradition agreement with Armenia, and so the prosecution is currently in discussions to possible put the suspect on trial in Armenia.