A pair of recent international cybercrime cases out of Pittsburgh—one against an organized conspiracy based in Russia and another against a hacking unit of the Chinese military—have been heralded as groundbreaking and likely forecast a focus on that kind of prosecution.
The suit announced last week against Evgeniy Bogachev, who allegedly ran a “botnet” scheme from Russia that stole millions of dollars, involved orders from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania to allow officials to sever computers that had been swept into the “botnet” and redirect them away from the servers that illegally collected money and toward government-controlled servers. Criminal charges are pending in both Pittsburgh and Omaha, Neb., according to the FBI.
