MOSCOW, June 20 (RAPSI) - The Tushinky District Court in Moscow has ruled on Thursday against the dismissal of the case against the suspects in a DDoS attack on Aeroflot's website in 2010, RAPSI reports from the court.

The court has rejected the appeal filed by one of the lawyers who claimed that the laptop computers from which the attack was allegedly made were switched on several times after they were confiscated from the defendants to download 2 Gbytes of new information.

On August 1, 2012, the Moscow City Court returned the case of the DDoS attack on Aeroflot's website to the Tushinsky District Court for review in response to a complaint filed by the prosecutor's office against the court's decision to return the case to the Prosecutor General's Office to have its omissions rectified.

Pavel Vrublevsky, Maxim Permyakov and Igor and Dmitry Artimovich were charged with organizing a DDoS attack on Aeroflot's website, which is run by the Assist processing company. Aeroflot's online ticket sales system was down for several days.

The investigators concluded that ChronoPay CEO Vrublevsky decided in July 2010 to terminate a contract on rendering services to sell e-tickets between Aeroflot and Assist, thus eliminating a rival firm.

According to the Prosecutor General's Office, Vrublevsky instructed Permyakov, the chief security expert at ChronoPay, to hire the Artimovich brothers to hack into Aeroflot's website. The brothers operated a network of virus-infected computers. 

The brothers were paid over $20,000 for the contract.

The Artimovich brothers attacked the website from July 15 to 24, blocking the e-ticket payment and acquisition system. 

The firms incurred substantial financial losses: Assist lost 15 million rubles ($488,090) and Aeroflot more than 146 million rubles ($4.75 million).

Acting upon an appeal filed by the defense lawyers earlier, the court dropped the charges under Article 273 of the Criminal Code, which stipulates punishment for creating a harmful program, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.

The case is being heard under Article 272 on illegal access to computer information protected by law, which resulted in its destruction, blocking, modification or copying. 

If found guilty, the hackers face up to two years in prison.