Scottish hacker jailed for 18 months after widespread malware attack

A 33-year-old father of five has been sentenced to 18 months in prison, after spreading malware around the world via millions of spammed out emails.

Matthew Anderson, from Drummuir, Aberdeenshire, was a member of the m00p virus-writing gang spreading malware in 2005 and 2006 including the Stinx Trojan horse, which was spammed out widely across the globe.

The Stinx Trojan horse contained a reference to the m00p gang inside its code.

Other attacks distributed by the international gang included bogus messages which pretended to come from Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure, tasteless fake emails which posed as CCTV…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.