As Ransomware Hackers Sit On Millions In Extorted Money, America’s Military Is Urged To Hack Back
Thomas Brewster, 05 June 2021
In just two months last year, the FBI watched three companies pay hackers wielding ransomware called NetWalker millions in Bitcoin to get their hacked data back. While that seems like a big win for the cybercriminals, it also gave investigators in the U.S. and elsewhere a new roadmap for tracking and prosecuting them.
Netwalker was a ransomware-as-a-service crew, similar to DarkSide and REvil, whose tools were used in the attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS, which led to gas and food shortages across America in the last month. The creators of NetWalker rented it out to other cybercriminals, who would find a way to break into a company and then deploy Netwalker to lock up the victims’ files. Only the key the Netwalker crew controlled could unlock that data. Since it emerged in 2019, its myriad victims included universities, healthcare bodies and government departments, making close to $50 million in that time. Continue reading “Article: As Ransomware Hackers Sit On Millions In Extorted Money, America’s Military Is Urged To Hack Back”
