Russian coder puts Microsoft botnet accusation behind him

24.10.2012
When 32-year-old Russian programmer Andrey N. Sabelnikov visited the U.S. for the first time in January, he had a surprise waiting for him.

The surprise was an amended civil lawsuit soon to be filed against him by Microsoft, which alleged he was the mastermind behind a network of hacked computers called Kelihos, which used the compromised Windows computers to send spam and install fake antivirus software.

After several months of effort, Microsoft it had reached a settlement with Sabelnikov, who described himself in an interview over email on Wednesday with IDG News Service as a C++ developer of high-performance backend applications.

The secret settlement, which neither Microsoft nor Sabelnikov will divulge, almost never happened.

Microsoft filed the amended civil suit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 23. Writing four days later, Sabelnikov strongly denied any connection with Kelihos, which infected around 45,000 or so computers but sent nearly 4 billion spam messages a day, promoting pornography and pharmaceutical products.

An avid photographer, Sabelnikov's website that showed his portfolio may have implicated him. Security writer Brian Krebs that the source code for Kelihos contained debug code that would download an installer for Kelihos from Sabelnikov's website.