Online Attack Leads to Peek Into Spam Den

If he were known at all to Western security analysts who track the origins of spam, and in particular the ubiquitous subset of spam e-mails that promote male sexual enhancement products, it was only by the handle he used in Russian chat rooms, Engel.

His pleasant existence, living in obscurity, changed this summer when a court in Moscow linked Mr. Artimovich and three others with one of the world’s most prolific spambots, or illegal networks of virus-infected computers that send spam.

The ruling provided a peek into the shrouded world of the Viagra-spam industry, a multimillion-dollar illegal enterprise with tentacles stretching from Russia to India. Around the world every day, millions of people open their e-mail in-boxes to find invitations to buy Viagra or some other drug, potion or device to enhance sexual performance.

Who sends these notes and how they make money had remained a mystery to most recipients. The court put names and faces to a shadowy global network of infected computers known outside Russia as Festi and inside the country as Topol-Mailer, named after an intercontinental ballistic missile, the Topol-M. It was powerful enough to generate, at times, up to a third of all spam e-mail messages circulating globally.

Prosecutors say Mr. Artimovich was one of two principal programmers who controlled the network of infected computers in a group that included a former signals intelligence officer in the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B.

Once they control the virus-infected computers, they are able to use software embedded on home and business computers to send persistent e-mails. The owner of an infected computer usually never knows the PC has been compromised.

More often than not these days, those infected computers are in India, Brazil and other developing countries where users cannot afford virus protection. But the high-end programming of viruses often takes place in Russia.

While the business model has been well understood — it was the subject of an extensive study by the University of California, San Diego — the individuals behind one of the largest spam gangs using it have largely avoided official scrutiny, until recently.

The Tushino Court in Moscow convicted two people of designing and controlling the Festi botnet, and two others of paying for its services, but none of them specifically of distributing spam. Instead, the court convicted the group of using the Festi network in 2010 to turn thousands of browsers simultaneously to the Web page of the online payment system of Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, crashing it in what is known as a distributed denial of service attack.

The spambot problem has vexed Western law enforcement officials, who complain the Russians ignore losses to global businesses that pay about $6 billion annually for spam filters, and to companies like Pfizer for sales lost to counterfeit pills.

Computer security experts have long been intrigued by the possibility that the Russian government has turned to so-called black hat hackers for political tasks in exchange offering protection from prosecution. But any direct evidence has been lacking, though the Festi case adds to the circumstantial evidence.

Russian authorities deny creating or turning a blind eye to botnets used to attack the Web sites of dissidents, or banks and government institutions in neighboring countries like Estonia or Georgia.

Valery V. Yaschenko, a deputy director of the Kremlin-linked Institute for Problems of Information Security, said the Russian government “condemns the practice of using strangers’ computers for attacks, or for any reason.”

For years, spam has been a very good business for Russian criminal gangs. An estimated $60 million a year is pulled in through these networks. Despite the Russian prosecutors’ victory this summer, similar networks remain active as tools for fraud and hacker attacks. Computer security experts say that suggests either the wrong men were convicted or the controlling codes were passed to somebody else.

Stefan Savage, a professor in the systems and networking group at the University of California, San Diego, studied the Festi scheme, in part by making test purchases.