title:  Wife Of Arrested Russian Hacker Just Spoke Out, And Trump Is Shaking In His Boots
text: The wife of a Russian hacker who was arrested in Spain has spoken out, confirming that her husband, Pyotr Levashov, was (allegedly) involved in hacking our election. I asked for a warrant or some papers, they said they showed them to my husband,  Maria Levashova says.  With my husband, I talked to the commissariat by phone, he said that he was shown some piece of paper in Spanish without a seal and his photo in poor quality. Something was said about the fact that the virus my husband allegedly created was related to Trump s victory in the elections. Levashov, better recognized as  Peter Severa  and  Peter of the North  in hacking circles, is well-known in the cybercrime community. Krebs on Security reports:According to numerous stories here at KrebsOnSecurity, Levashov was better known as  Severa,  the hacker moniker used by a pivotal figure in many Russian-language cybercrime forums. Severa was the moderator for the spam subsection of multiple online communities, and in this role served as the virtual linchpin connecting virus writers with huge spam networks   including some that Severa allegedly created and sold himself.Levashov is currently listed as #7 in the the world s Top 10 Worst Spammers list maintained by anti-spam group Spamhaus. The U.S. Justice Department maintains that Severa was the Russian partner of Alan Ralsky, a convicted American spammer who specialized in  pump-and-dump  spam schemes designed to artificially inflate the value of penny stocks.Levashov allegedly went by the aliases Peter Severa and Peter of the North (Pyotr is the Russian form of Peter). My reporting indicates that   in addition to spamming activities   Severa was responsible for running multiple criminal operations that paid virus writers and spammers to install  fake antivirus  software. So-called  fake AV  uses malware and/or programming tricks to bombard the victim with misleading alerts about security threats, hijacking the PC until its owner either pays for a license to the bogus security software or figures out how to remove the invasive program.There is ample evidence that Severa is the cybercriminal behind the Waledac spam botnet, a spam engine that for several years infected between 70,000 and 90,000 computers and was capable of sending approximately 1.5 billion spam messages a day.In 2010, Microsoft launched a combined technical and legal sneak attack on the Waledac botnet, successfully dismantling it. The company would later do the same to the Kelihos botnet, a global spam machine which shared a great deal of computer code with Waledac.The connection between Waledac/Kelihos and Severa is supported by data leaked in 2010 after hackers broke into the servers of pharmacy spam affiliate program SpamIt. According to the stolen SpamIt records, Severa   this time using the alias  Viktor Sergeevich Ivashov    brought in revenues of $438,000 and earned commissions of $145,000 spamming rogue online pharmacy sites over a 3-year period.Severa also was a moderator of Spamdot.biz (pictured in the first screenshot above), a vetted, members-only forum that at one time attracted almost daily visits from most of Russia s top spammers. Leaked Spamdot forum posts for Severa indicate that he hails from Saint Petersburg, Russia s second-largest city.Sevara is currently in custody in Barcelona, but is subject to an extradition request by the United States. Spanish news website El Confidencial also confirms that the arrest was related to hacking that helped Donald Trump  win  the election.With Trump screaming FAKE NEWS every time new facts come out about his collusion with Vladimir Putin to take the Oval Office by any means necessary   even if it does involve some Russian hackers, an aggressive propaganda campaign, and probably a couple Russian pee pee hookers   this news is not good for him. We can fully expect a meltdown on some sort on Twitter as soon as Breitbart reports on the arrest.Featured image via Getty Images/Pool