Today's story about the US Treasury Dept's sanctioning 7 men in connection with the malware platform Trickbot has several interesting wrinkles.

From my report:

"Only one of the men sanctioned today is known to have been criminally charged in connection with hacking activity. According to the Treasury Department, the alleged senior leader of the Trickbot group is 34-year-old Russian national Vitaly “Bentley” Kovalev.

A New Jersey grand jury indicted Kovalev in 2012 after an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service determined that he ran a massive “money mule” scheme, which used phony job offers to trick people into laundering money stolen from hacked small to mid-sized businesses in the United States.

In 2015, Kovalev reportedly began filming a movie in Russia about cybercrime called “Botnet.” According to a 2016 story from Forbes.ru, Botnet’s opening scene was to depict the plight of Christina Svechinskaya, a Russian student arrested by FBI agents in September 2010.

Svechinskaya was one of Bentley’s money mules, most of whom were young Russian students on summer travel visas in the United States. She was among 37 alleged mules charged with aiding an international cybercrime operation — basically, setting up phony corporate bank accounts for the sole purpose of laundering stolen funds.

Although she possessed no real hacking skills, Svechinskaya’s mugshot and social media photos went viral online and she was quickly dubbed “the world’s sexiest computer hacker” by the tabloids.

Kovalev’s Botnet film project was disrupted after Russian authorities raided the film production company’s offices as part of a cybercrime investigation. In February 2016, Reuters reported that the raid was connected to a crackdown on “Dyre,” a sophisticated trojan that U.S. federal investigators say was the precursor to the Trickbot malware. The Forbes.ru article cited sources close to the investigation who said the film studio was operating as a money-laundering front for the cybercrooks behind Dyre."

The crazier part is three Russian cybercrime investigators who touched by Dyre investigation were later charged with treason by the Kremlin, allegedly for helping American cybercrime investigators go after top Russian hackers.

In a major shakeup in 2017, the Kremlin levied treason charges against Sergey Mikhaylov, then deputy chief of Russia’s top anti-cybercrime unit.

Also charged with treason was Ruslan Stoyanov, then a senior employee at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab [the Forbes.ru report from 2016 said investigators from Mikhaylov’s unit and Kaspersky Lab were present at the film company raid].

Russian media outlets have speculated that the men were accused of treason for helping American cybercrime investigators pursue top Russian hackers. However, the charges against both men were classified and have never been officially revealed. After their brief, closed trial, both men were convicted of treason. Mikhaylov was given a 22 year prison sentence; Stoyanov was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

In September 2021, the Kremlin issued treason charges against Ilya Sachkov, formerly head of the cybersecurity firm Group-IB. According to Reuters, Sachkov and his company were hired by the film studio “to advise the Botnet director and writers on the finer points of cybercrime.” Sachkov remains imprisoned in Russia pending his treason trial.

Read more here:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/02/u-s-u-k-sanction-7-men-tied-to-trickbot-hacking-group/