MOSCOW, December 13 - RAPSI. Lyudmila Aivar, the attorney of ChronoPay founder Pavel Vrublevsky, has filed a supervisory appeal with the Supreme Court, claiming that there were errors made in the case of the hacker attack on Aeroflot's website. The attorney told the Russian Legal Information Agency (RAPSI/rapsinews.com) that they requested to return the case to the prosecutor's office so as to have the investigators' violations rectified.
Aivar believes that a legal sentence cannot be issued over the case as there was a mistake made over the charges which neither the judge not the prosecutor are entitled to correct during the court hearings.
On August 1, the Moscow City Court remanded the 2010 criminal case of the DDoS attack on Aeroflot's website to the Moscow Tushinsky District Court for review, in response to a complaint filed by the prosecutor's office.
The Tushinsky District Court had decided to return the case to the Prosecutor General's Office to have its omissions rectified, but the prosecutors disagreed and challenged the decision in the higher court.
Hacker attack charges were brought against Pavel Vrublevsky and Maxim Permyakov, as well as Igor and Dmitry Artimovich, for organizing the 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.
Investigators concluded that Vrublevsky, ChronoPay's CEO, 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 ordered the Artimovich brothers to conduct a hacker attack on Aeroflot's website via Permyakov. The brothers operated a network of virus-infected computers. Vrublevsky paid them over $20,000.
The Artimovich brothers attacked the website from July 15 to July 24, blocking the e-ticket payment and acquisition system. The firms incurred substantial financial losses. Assist's damages amounted to 15 million rubles ($488,090).
Aeroflot's exceeded 146 million rubles ($4.75 million).
