Right now a man named Alexander Zukoff is sitting in jail for one of the most financially ruinous schemes ever invented for the internet.

Zukov is guilty. He was caught and convicted under a mountain of evidence against him.

Simple as that.

Here's the thing. The overwhelming majority of people involved in his case and the people who have written and spoken about it since would have you believe

that what you've just heard is the whole story. Bad guy, cyber crimes, jail.

Except the deeper you look into it, the deeper the well goes.

The picture widens like those old Alfred Hitchcock close-ups. As we zoom in, what we're looking at strangely appears further away.

Hi I'm Ran Levy welcome to Cyber Reasons Malicious Life.

In this episode we'll learn how Alexander Zukoff defrauded some of the biggest American

corporations for millions of dollars and we'll ask the question that hardly anyone else is willing to acknowledge.

Was this clever, successful, guilty cyber criminal, merely a far guy for everybody else playing his twisted game.

It was September 2015 when a group of researchers working for the cyber security firm White

Ops noticed a quote unquote small amount of automated web traffic all bearing the signature of the same

bot. They started monitoring just in case thinking little of it.

That is, quote, until October of the following year when the bot morphed and began to scale and adapt aggressively.

We at malicious life reached out to White Ops, now called Human, for an interview.

They declined as they were advised by the FBI not to comment on an ongoing legal case.

So we can only pull from what they've already published online, namely their initial

white paper we're reading from now.

In September 2016, White Ops detected a mutation in a previously low-volume

bot signature which had been flagged as C3 since September 2015.

The security research team continued to track the evolution of C3

...