US charges East European cyber virus gang

US law enforcement on Wednesday announced charges against three alleged East European cyber thiefs accused of stealing banking information from computers across Europe and the United States, including at the space agency NASA. The "alleged international cyber criminals (were) responsible for creating and distributing a computer virus that infected over one million computers -- at least 40,000 of which were in the US -- and caused millions in losses by, among other things, stealing online banking credentials," the federal prosecutor's office in Manhattan said. The defendants allegedly used a malicious computer code or malware dubbed the "Gozi Virus" to hack into bank accounts and "steal millions of dollars," stated the indictment against one of the defendants, Deniss Calovskis, who is also known as "Miami." Prosecutors say the scam unfolded between 2005 and March 2012 and that the virus was "virtually undetectable in the computers it infected." First, it was implanted in computers across Europe "on a vast scale," then around 2010 it spread to the United States, the Calovskis indictment said. In the United States, "more than 160 were computers belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)" were infected, the indictment said. Financial losses caused by the "Gozi Virus" hit "at a minimum, millions of dollars," the indictment said. Calovskis, a computer programming expert, has been arrested in his home country of Latvia, the Manhattan federal prosecutor's office told AFP. The virus' alleged designer and "chief architect," Nikita Kuzmin, from Russia, was in US custody, while the third man, Mihai Ionut Paunescu from Romania and nicknamed "Virus," was in Romanian custody, prosecutors said