The trial was earlier this month.
Two brothers who authored CoinVault ransomware were found guilty by a Dutch court of infecting some 14,000 Windows machines in 20 countries and extorting more than 1,200 people who paid Bitcoin to get their files decrypted.
Finally, those committing cybercrimes are being held accountable. Right?
Actually, that may be a matter of opinion.
According to Dark Reading, the prosecutor in the case essentially asked for a nine-month jail sentence.
Instead, the court sentenced the young men to 240 hours of community service.
Those on the Dark Web must be laughing their keyboards off.
When you read the description of all that CoinVault ransomware did on SecureList, it seems hard to believe this was just punishment for the crime, although there is probably no way to know for sure unless we were sitting in the courtroom ourselves.
At least the U.S. Department of Justice has indicted 12 Russian operatives who hacked the Democratic National Committee with cyber tricks.
The only problem? It's likely those 12 will never be tried or punished for their crime. They would have to leave Russia and get arrested in a country that would extradite them to the U.S.
It makes you wonder: Where is the deterrent for cybercrime? And does a deterrent actually exist?
