Judge Orders US Lawyer In Russian Botnet Case To Pay Google

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: In December 2021, Google filed a civil lawsuit against two Russian men thought to be responsible for operating Glupteba, one of the Internet's largest and oldest botnets. The defendants, who initially pursued a strategy of counter suing Google for tortious interference in their sprawling cybercrime business, later brazenly offered to dismantle the botnet in exchange for payment from Google. The judge in the case was not amused, found for the plaintiff, and ordered the defendants and their U.S. attorney to pay Google's legal fees. The lawyer for the defendants, New York-based cybercrime defense attorney Igor Litvak, filed a motion to reconsider (PDF), asking the court to vacate the sanctions against him. He said his goal is to get the case back into court. "The judge was completely wrong to issue sanctions," Litvak told KrebsOnSecurity. "From the beginning of the case, she acted as if she needed to protect Google from something. If the court does not decide to vacate the sanctions, we will have to go to the Second Circuit (Court of Appeals) and get justice there." Meanwhile, Google said the court's decision will have significant ramifications for online crime, adding that it's observed a 78 percent reduction in the number of hosts infected by Glupteba since its technical and legal attacks on the botnet last year. "While Glupteba operators have resumed activity on some non-Google platforms and IoT devices, shining a legal spotlight on the group makes it less appealing for other criminal operations to work with them," reads a blog post from Google's General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado and vice president of engineering Royal Hansen. "And the steps [Google] took last year to disrupt their operations have already had significant impact."

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