Two men who built and sold a banking trojan that infected more than 50 million computers around the world and caused almost $1 billion in losses have been sentenced to a combined 24 years in prison.
Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, the chief developer and distributor of SpyEye, received a sentence of nine years and six months in federal prison, according to a statement issued by the US Department of Justice. In underground forums where the trojan was sold, the 27-year-old Russian national went by the hacker aliases “Gribodemon” and “Harderman.” In 2010, prosecutors said, he received the source code to a crimeware platform dubbed ZeuS. From 2009 to 2011, he conspired with others to develop SpyEye, which is believed to have borrowed liberally from ZeuS.
