As reported previously by Infosecurity, Vrublevsky was arrested in June of this year amidst allegations that he hired a hacker to attack one of ChronoPay's rivals.
Now Krebs is saying that Vrubelevsky's arrest “was the product of a bribe paid by Igor Gusev, the other co-founder of ChronoPay and a man wanted by Russian police as a spam kingpin.”
In this morning's security blog posting, the Krebs on Security researcher saif that, two years after forming ChronoPay in 2003, Gusev and Vrublevsky parted ways.
“Not long after that breakup, Gusev would launch Glavmed and its sister program SpamIt, affiliate programs that paid the world's most notorious spammers millions of dollars to promote rogue internet pharmacies. Not to be outdone, Vrublevsky started his own rogue pharmacy program, Rx-Promotion, in 2007, contracting with some of the same spammers who were working at Gusev's programs”, Krebs said.
“By 2009, the former partners were actively trying to scuttle each others' businesses. Vrublevsky allegedly paid hackers to break into and leak the contact and earnings data from GlavMed/SpamIt. He also reportedly paid a man named Igor 'Angel' Artimovich to launch a volley of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against SpamIt”, he added.
The security researcher goes on to say that Gusev told him that he suspected Artimovich was involved in the attacks, and that he also had information that Vrublevsky hired Artimovich to attack ChronoPay's rivals, during a period when they were competing for a major contract to process online payments for Aeroflot, Russia's flagship airline.
Last month, noted Krebs, hundreds of chat conversations apparently between Gusev and his right-hand man, Dmitry Stupin, were leaked online. They indicate, he claimed, that Gusev may have caused Vrublevsky's arrest by paying Russian law enforcement investigators to go after Artimovich.