Igor Artimovich

Early Life

Igor Alexandrovich Artimovich was born on March 24, 1982, in Kaliningrad Oblast, in the Soviet Union. At six months of age, he relocated with his family to Leningrad Oblast, where he was raised and completed his secondary education. His earliest programming experiences came through the BASIC language on the ZX Spectrum home computer.

Education

In 1999, Artimovich enrolled at Saint-Petersburg State University in the faculty of Applied Mathematics, relocating to Saint-Petersburg at that time. He completed his studies in 2004, defending a thesis and receiving a diploma with the qualification of "Mathematician."

Career at Sun Microsystems

Following his graduation, Artimovich joined the Saint-Petersburg branch of Sun Microsystems in 2004, where he worked on the development of the C compiler as part of the Sun Studio software development toolset. His responsibilities included porting the C language compiler to the amd64 platform and implementing Linux-specific compiler functionality. He remained at Sun Microsystems until 2008.

In an interview with The New York Times, Artimovich stated that after leaving Sun Microsystems he pursued independent research in information security and computer viruses, and also worked on developing his own antivirus software for Windows operating systems.

The Festi Botnet and Aeroflot Cyberattack

Artimovich operates under the pseudonym "Engel," a nickname derived from a song by the German rock group Rammstein.

In the summer of 2010, a cyberattack resembling a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) operation was launched against the electronic ticket payment system of the Russian airline Aeroflot. The attack was of sufficient magnitude to overwhelm the infrastructure of the backbone internet provider serving the payment system, forcing Aeroflot to suspend online ticket sales for approximately one week.

In the autumn of 2010, researchers at the antivirus company ESET investigated the attack and concluded that the Festi botnet had been used to carry it out. The investigation drew the attention of Russian intelligence services, which identified Artimovich as the creator and operator of Festi. These findings were corroborated publicly by security journalist Brian Krebs in an article titled "Who Is the 'Festi' Botmaster?" and by New York Times journalist Andrew Kramer in a piece titled "Online Attack Leads to Peek Into Spam Den." ESET also presented findings on the Festi botnet at the AVAR 2012 conference in Hangzhou, China, a gathering dedicated to antivirus technologies and corporate security.