US Law Enforcement Scores Big Victories Against Cyber Criminals

I have an uplifting and positive story for today. I am going to praise U.S. law enforcement. We have all heard about criminal hackers. Here are some scenarios on how these villains can personally impact you as follows:

1) You come home from work one evening. You find a letter from your health insurance provider. It gives you the bad news that there has been a data breach of millions of policyholders. Your personal details including your name, date of birth, Social Security number or national identity document, and your medical record details have been compromised. You are now at risk of an identity fraud attack. You also might be subject to blackmail based on confidential data in your medical record.

2) You go to your bank to draw funds from the savings account that you have held there for 15 years. You present your withdrawal slip to the teller. You get the shocking news that your account has been emptied. All funds have been wire-transferred to a bank account in China, Russia, or Iran.

3) You are hosting a dinner for friends and family members at an upscale restaurant. The waiter brings you the bill. You hand up your Visa card. You get the shocking news that your credit card has been declined. You pick up your mobile phone. You log into the credit card account. Your card has been "maxed out." Some hacker got hold of your credit card data and spent all the money half a world away.

4) You are seriously ill. You go to the emergency room at your local hospital. You see staff members using pens and paper to record data. You get the shocking news that the hospital's computer system has been taken over by ransomware. A ransom of millions of dollars is demanded to release the hospital's computer system.

The people committing these crimes most often hide out in countries like Russia, China, Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, or Cuba. U.S. law enforcement agencies do their due diligence. They identify the foreign actors responsible. Grand jury indictments are returned. Interpol Red Notices are put in place. Then nothing happens. The villains are hiding in a sanctuary where U.S. law enforcement cannot penetrate.

   This has changed recently. Maksim Silnakau aged 38 and a citizen of Belarus was arrested in Poland. He has been ordered extradited to the U.S. He will appear in court in New Jersey today. He is a giant operator in ransomware hacking. malicious advertising, etc. In the world of criminal justice, he would be described as "a big fish."

The FBI's Cleveland office has taken down a major ransomware gang with details as follows:

The FBI said Monday it seized the servers of a ransomware and extortion gang called Radar (aka Dispossessor). At the time of writing, Radar’s website features a message from law enforcement, reading: “This website has been seized.” It’s a rare win for the FBI, which along with global law enforcement agencies has struggled to contain and curtail the rising threat from ransomware.

In a statement from the FBI’s Cleveland, Ohio, field office, the feds said they seized the gang’s domains and servers located in the United Kingdom and Germany. Radar/Dispossessor had at least 43 victim companies since the gang started in August 2023, the agency said.

The FBI said the Radar/Dispossessor group, led by a ringleader named “Brain,” would exploit security flaws in a victim company’s systems, steal vast amounts of data, and scramble the company’s data with encryption. The gang would hold the data hostage in exchange for a ransom, and threaten to publish the data if the ransom wasn’t paid, a common tactic used by extortion gangs known as “double extortion.”