Hi and welcome to malicious life in collaboration with cyberism. I'm Ran Levy.

At an age when most of us were graduating high school,

going through our rebellious phases, deciding what we want to do with

our futures, Nikita Kuzmin was a prime target of the American and Russian governments making hundreds of thousands of dollars off the

criminal underground. His friends were some of the most respected hackers of their time.

It billed 76 service, the most sophisticated malware to date, and now in his 20s was working on a new 76 service so good that it make the first irrelevant.

To fund his second project, he sold the first Gosey Trojans source code for $50,000 plus a share in future profits to a fellow

hang-up team member well known to the Hacker Underground in Russia.

His name is NSD and he will make a comeback later in our story.

Between 2007 and 2010, Nikita worked on modernizing his malware mostly by contracting hackers for hire.

Three years on, little meaningful progress had been made, so just as it did in 2006 for the first Gozi he recruited some help.

If you visit the Wikipedia page for Dennis Shalefsky you might find it confusing. It claims he is the creator of the

Gosevirus which he is not. But even more confusing are the apparent

contradictions in his life. He's a criminal and the

founder of social non-profits, a malware author, but also a certified data protection officer.

That's like being a cow and a fry cook.

Most hackers look pretty bad in pictures.

Unkept hair, a t-shirt, you know.

Dennis on the other hand always looks like he's ready to give a TED Talk.

So who really is this Dennis Shalofsky?

Is he a cyber criminal fronting as a tech professional or a good

guy who fell into a bad situation? Over the following half decade, many important people would disagree on the answer.

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