In June of this year, the hacker and extorter known as Deepsy developed a fast and loose reputation among porn site webmasters and administrators for threats of denial of service if certain financial demands were not met.
Deepsy's actions were described by many victims of the hacker attacks as being pure "vendetta" against the adult entertainment industry.
In conjunction with the FBI's Computer Crime Lab, police officials in Beersheba, Israel, took the twenty-year-old hacker into custody for allegedly blackmailing a company called CyberTrend, Corp., a purveyor of adult websites based in Las Vegas and California.
CyberTrend is said to have been blackmailed for tens of thousands of dollars, but after payment was given, relief from the attacks was not forthcoming and for hours at a time the company's websites would fall off the web as a result of Deepsy's persistent shenanigans. In the meantime, the wiley hacker managed to loot CyberTrend's credit card database.
Pavlov has pleaded "not guilty" to the charges.
At this point in the investigation, there is only speculation that there is a broader connection between Pavlov and the hacker known to have waged a war against the adult industry over the past three months. The tip that led to Pavlov's arrest was that money extorted from CyberTrend was directed to a Beersheba-based bank account, the Israeli media reported.
The first website assault began in June of this year at the gofuckyourself.com web bulletin board where the alleged hacker Deepsy threatened GFY's administrators to either ante up, or he’d blast them out of cyber space.
According to Wired News, the threat was ignored and twenty minutes later the GFY website went down. Deepsy demonstrated his hacker prowess by restoring the website to working order an hour later and repeated his financial demands. From that point, Deepsy began his industry-wide assault against other adult websites.
The extent of his blackmailing attempts have not yet been determined, although many victims of his attacks were forced to pay for mercy while others were let off the hook or waged their own defensive cyber campaign against him, sources said.
Results of the Israeli police investigation are still pending, according to reports from the Israeli media.
A first-time hacking offense could result in a 10-year prison sentence, according to federal law.