A joint operation by US and UK agencies managed to dismantle the cybercrime group's essential infrastructure lockbit, based in Russia, having detained four of its members.
The operation was conducted by the FBI and the United Kingdom's National Crime Agency (NCA), and had the cooperation of Europol, allowing the arrest of two elements in Poland and two others operating in the United States.
This cybercrime group had reached several thousand victims around the world, having received more than 100 million euros in ransom payments over its four years of existence.
In the operation carried out today, considered one of the most relevant against cybercrime, around 200 cryptocurrency accounts were seized.
"The United States will not tolerate attempts to extort and steal from our citizens and institutions“, said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Wally Adeyemo, reacting to the result of this operation.
"We managed to 'hack' the 'hackers''”, said Graeme Biggar, director general of the NCA, at a press conference in London, ensuring that, from now on, “LockBit was paralyzed".
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"Today, we turned the tables on these cybercriminals“, said Philip Sellinger, New Jersey’s main federal prosecutor, at another press conference in the United States.
United States authorities denounce that Russia continues to offer a safe haven for cybercriminals, where groups like LockBit can launch their attacks.ransomware' — a form of computer virus that affects computers in a variety of ways, tricking people into opening files in messages that appear to be legitimate and then forcing organizations to pay ransoms to unlock systems.
European and U.S. agencies said they also seized servers the group used to organize and transfer victims' data and gained access to nearly 1.000 hacking tools.
LockBit – which has been operating since 2019, based in Russia – is the most prolific 'ransomware' group over the past two years, having been responsible for 23% of the nearly 4.000 global attacks last year.
In these attacks, hackers disclosed stolen data from victims to extort payments.
