Per a report by NBC 13, students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) helped take down notorious Russian cybercriminal Peter Levashov.

Levashov, who pleaded guilty in federal court last week, was caught running a network of computers infected with malicious software. Investigators say through those infected computers, the Russian was able to steal personal information, send out spam – to the tune of four billion messages per day – and install ransomware around the globe.

Thanks in part to students studying computer forensics at UAB, Levashov has been logged out of his criminal enterprise.

“There were times when I would stay an entire day, night, in the lab working,” UAB Ph.D. student Arsh Arora, who led the successful task-force, said.Gary Warner, who is the director of UAB’s computer forensics research and its corresponding lab, explained that this type of work is par for the course for the university’s impressive program.

“The students who are studying computer forensics come up into this lab and work on real-world cases,” Warned outlined.

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Sean Ross is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn