A Russian hacker, lured to the United States by the FBI under the ruse of a job interview in a case that prompted a sharp rebuke from Moscow, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison for computer crime.
The case represents the first time the Federal Bureau of Investigation successfully enticed people of high-tech crimes to come to the United States, and its first “extra-territorial seizure of digital evidence,” according to the agency and U.S. Department of Justice.
It is also the first time a U.S. agency has been formally accused of hacking into a foreign computer network, as the FBI downloaded evidence off suspects’ computer networks in Russia, they added.
The federal judge in the case rejected the prosecutor’s request that the hacker, Vasiliy Gorshkov, serve at least 16 years, said defense attorney John Lundin. Gorshkov also was ordered to pay restitution of about $690,000, he said.
Federal District Court Judge John Coughenour said financial and medical problems of Gorshkov’s family in Russia were factors in granting the reduced sentence, according to Lundin.
Gorshkov was convicted a year ago on 20 counts of computer crimes, fraud and conspiracy after being accused of helping Alexey Ivanov steal credit card numbers from U.S. companies.
Ivanov pleaded guilty in August to similar charges and extortion in separate indictments brought in five different federal courts, Lundin said. Ivanov was accused of breaking into computers of 11 companies in more than a handful of states, he said.
FBI created fake company
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle confirmed Gorshkov’s sentence but declined to comment further.
The November 2000 arrests of Gorshkov and Ivanov, both of Chelyabinsk, Russia, made international headlines because of the FBI’s novel methods to catch them.
The agency created a fake company, called “Invita,” and asked the Russians to come to Seattle for job interviews. The men were asked to prove their skills and given permission to scan an Invita computer network for vulnerabilities.
The computers they used had software on them that logged every keystroke and FBI agents were able to later grab the mens’ passwords and download evidence off their computer network in Russia.
Russian’s state security service, the FSB, lodged a complaint against the FBI earlier this year, alleging that the FBI didn’t have authorization to break into a computer system in Russia and download files.
The FBI countered that Russian law does not apply to the agents’ actions.