How Russian Spam King Peter Levashov Was Arrested, and His Kelihos Botnet Dismantled

One of the world’s most notorious spammers appears to have been tripped up by a basic cybersecurity no-no, according to the FBI: He used the same log-in credentials to both run his criminal enterprise and also log into sites like iTunes.

The Justice Department announced Monday that it had successfully targeted a man prosecutors called “one of the world’s most notorious criminal spammers,” a Russian hacker known as Peter Yuryevich Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, or “Peter of the North.” Levashov had long run the Kelihos botnet, a global network of infected computers that collectively flooded email inboxes worldwide…