MOSCOW, March 29 (RAPSI) – Russian citizen Maxim Senakh, who had been extradited from Finland to the United States, pleaded guilty to infecting computer servers around the globe with malicious computer software, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.

Senakh, 41, has been charged with conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and to commit wire fraud resulting in a financial loss worth millions of dollars.

He was arrested in Finland in August 2015 and later extradited to the United States. Russia condemned actions of the two countries and called Senakh's arrest "another demonstration of the illegal practice of arrest of Russian citizens abroad launched by U.S. authorities.”

According to the U.S. authorities, the malware, also known as Ebury, “harvested log-on credentials from infected computer servers”, allowing the defendant and his accomplices “to create and operate a botnet comprising tens of thousands of infected servers throughout the world, including thousands in the United States.” The criminal group members used the botnet “to generate and redirect internet traffic in furtherance of various click-fraud and spam e-mail schemes,” the statement of the Department of Justice reads.

Senakh has confessed that he was creating accounts with domain registrars for developing the Ebury botnet infrastructure. He also admitted that he had got a profit from traffic generated by the malware, according to the statement.

Sentencing of Senakh is scheduled for August 3, 2017.