Viruses nip Russia after the Cold War

Situation likely to worsen as virus writing becomes a lucrative occupation in former Soviet Union

The combination of over-educated and under-employed specialists has made Russia an ideal breeding ground for hackers. The hacker community was infused with professionals following a financial crash in 1998 that left many computer programmers and business people financially destroyed and out of work. Even today, the country continues to churn out plenty of students who excel at mathematics and physics, but who struggle to find work.

"Russian criminals offer students money to spend time with them to carry out illegitimate activities in return for cash," Matai said. "They're active not only in schools and universities, but also through their own recruitment centers where they siphon off talent for organized criminal purposes, which include selling services to groups in other countries, such as Islamic hackers."

Another factor making Russia an even more fertile nest for hackers is the growing number of residents now able to access the Internet. The Ministry for Communications projects their numbers to grow from 6 percent of the population (around 148 million) in 2003 to 15 percent by 2005. Eleven million people currently use the Internet, while around 9 million own a computer.

Cybercrime doubled in 2003 to 11,000 reported cases, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The most frequent crimes were illegal access to computer information, distribution of pirated software and cyberattacks on financial institutions.

Russian hackers have been behind some of the most audacious cybercrimes ever reported. Mathematician and computer specialist Vladimir Levin from St. Petersburg was nabbed in 1995 and sentenced to three years in a Florida prison in 1997 for hacking into Citibank Inc.'s computers and electronically transferring around $10 million out of the bank's accounts. To this day, no one knows exactly how he broke into the bank's system.

In 1999, Russian hackers were credited with disrupting NATO and U.S. government Web sites.

In 2000, Vasiliy Gorshkov and Alexey Ivanov were lured to the U.S. by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and later arrested. Gorshkov was sentenced to three years in prison and given a $700,000 fine after he was convicted on 20 counts of conspiracy, fraud and other related computer crimes. The pair had admitted hacking into the computers of U.S. companies to steal credit card information and other personal financial data and then extort money from the victims by threatening to expose that information to the public on the Internet or to damage the companies' computers.

A gang of computer hackers, headed by a 63-year-old pensioner, was arrested by Russian police in 2001. The former computer programmer for a Moscow institute was apparently bitter over receiving no royalties from his work. So he teamed up with a former policeman and three others to steal the details of credit cards from individuals in the U.S. and Europe and use them to make online purchases. The gang then channeled their income back to Moscow through a bogus Internet site they had created, which sold useless information about timber in Russia.