A US federal courtroom has unssealed fees in opposition to a Ukrainian nationwide who authorities allege was a key determine behind a number of strains of ransomware, together with LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim.
Volodymyr Viktorovich Tymoshchuk (who can also be stated to make use of the aliases “deadforz”, “Boba”, “msfv”, and “farnetwork”) has been charged for his alleged function in a sequence of ransomware assaults that extorted over 250 corporations throughout the USA, and a whole lot extra globally.
In accordance with a US Division of Justice press launch concerning the indictment, Tymoshchuk is claimed to have used variants of the LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim ransomware between December 2018 and October 2021 to encrypt laptop networks around the globe, inflicting losses totalling hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.
Nevertheless, it’s claimed that lots of the extortion makes an attempt failed as a result of regulation enforcement businesses notified victims that their networks had been compromised by Tymoshchuk and his co-conspirators earlier than the ransomware payload was deployed.
The LockerGoga ransomware gained notoriety after a sequence of excessive profile assaults together with the 2019 hack of Norsk Hydro, a significant producer of aluminium and hydroelectric energy in Norway. Different victims have included French engineering agency Altran, and industrial corporations Hexion and Momentive.
LockerGoga’s actions got here to a sudden halt in October 2021, after Europol arrested 12 individuals alleged to be related to the group in Ukraine and Switzerland.
In September 2022, decryption keys related to the LockerGoga ransomware have been made obtainable to most of the people by way of the No Extra Ransom challenge – serving to corporations unlock their compromised knowledge and computer systems with out having to pay a ransom. An analogous decryptor was made obtainable for MegaCortex in January 2023.
Then, in November 2023, Europol introduced that additional arrests had been made in Kyiv, Ukraine, dismantling the ransomware group believed to have been deploying variants of LockerGoga, MegaCortex, Hive, and Dharma. Pc tools, vehicles, cost playing cards, SIM playing cards, in addition to monetary and cryptocurrency property have been seized by authorities.
In accordance with Joseph Nocella Jr. US Lawyer for the Japanese District of New York, Tymoshchuk is “a serial ransomware prison who focused blue-chip American corporations, well being care establishments, and enormous overseas industrial corporations, and threatened to leak their delicate knowledge on-line in the event that they refused to pay.”
However sadly for the US authorities, they don’t have 28-year-old Tymoshchuk of their custody.
What they do have is a bounty of ten million {dollars}, for anybody who may give them data resulting in the arrest and conviction of Volodymyr Viktorovych Tymoshchuk.
An additional US $1,000,000 has been made obtainable for data resulting in the arrest and/or conviction of different key leaders of the Nefilim, LockerGoga, and MegaCortex ransomware variants
Editor’s Word: The opinions expressed on this and different visitor writer articles are solely these of the contributor and don’t essentially replicate these of Fortra.
