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Co-authored by Tejas Sheth, Sr. Security Specialist, Amazon Web Services – AISPL.
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The FBI’s takedown of the LockBit ransomware group last week came as LockBit was preparing to release sensitive data stolen from government computer systems in Fulton County, Ga. But LockBit is now regrouping, and the gang says it will publish the stolen Fulton County data on March 2 unless paid a ransom. LockBit claims the cache includes documents tied to the county’s ongoing criminal prosecution of former President Trump, but court watchers say teaser documents published by the crime gang suggest a total leak of the Fulton County data could put lives at risk and jeopardize a number of other criminal trials.
A new LockBit website listing a countdown timer until the promised release of data stolen from Fulton County, Ga.
In early February, Fulton County leaders acknowledged they were responding to an intrusion that caused disruptions for its phone, email and billing systems, as well as a range of county services, including court systems.
On Feb. 13, the LockBit ransomware group posted on its victim shaming blog a new entry for Fulton County, featuring a countdown timer saying the group would publish the data on Feb. 16 unless county leaders agreed to negotiate a ransom.
“We will demonstrate how local structures negligently handled information protection,” LockBit warned. “We will reveal lists of individuals responsible for confidentiality. Documents marked as confidential will be made publicly available. We will show documents related to access to the state citizens’ personal data. We aim to give maximum publicity to this situation; the documents will be of interest to many. Conscientious residents will bring order.”
Yet on Feb. 16, the entry for Fulton County was removed from LockBit’s site without explanation. This usually only happens after the victim in question agrees to pay a ransom demand and/or enters into negotiations with their extortionists.
However, Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said the board decided it “could not in good conscience use Fulton County taxpayer funds to make a payment.”
“We did not pay nor did anyone pay on our behalf,” Pitts said at an incident briefing on Feb. 20.
Just hours before that press conference, LockBit’s various websites were seized by the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA), which replaced the ransomware group’s homepage with a seizure notice and used the existing design of LockBit’s victim shaming blog to publish press releases about the law enforcement action.
The feds used the existing design on LockBit’s victim shaming website to feature press releases and free decryption tools.
Dubbed “Operation Cronos,” the effort involved the seizure of nearly three-dozen servers; the arrest of two alleged LockBit members; the release of a free LockBit decryption tool; and the freezing of more than 200 cryptocurrency accounts thought to be tied to the gang’s activities. The government says LockBit has claimed more than 2,000 victims worldwide and extorted over $120 million in payments.
In a lengthy, rambling letter published on Feb. 24 and addressed to the FBI, the ransomware group’s leader LockBitSupp announced that their victim shaming websites were once again operational on the dark web, with fresh countdown timers for Fulton County and a half-dozen other recent victims.
“The FBI decided to hack now for one reason only, because they didn’t want to leak information fultoncountyga.gov,” LockBitSupp wrote. “The stolen documents contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump’s court cases that could affect the upcoming US election.”
A screen shot released by LockBit showing various Fulton County file shares that were exposed.
LockBit has already released roughly two dozen files allegedly stolen from Fulton County government systems, although none of them involve Mr. Trump’s criminal trial. But the documents do appear to include court records that are sealed and shielded from public viewing.
George Chidi writes The Atlanta Objective, a Substack publication on crime in Georgia’s capital city. Chidi says the leaked data so far includes a sealed record related to a child abuse case, and a sealed motion in the murder trial of Juwuan Gaston demanding the state turn over confidential informant identities.
Chidi cites reports from a Fulton County employee who said the confidential material includes the identities of jurors serving on the trial of the rapper Jeffery “Young Thug” Williams, who is charged along with five other defendants in a racketeering and gang conspiracy.
“The screenshots suggest that hackers will be able to give any attorney defending a criminal case in the county a starting place to argue that evidence has been tainted or witnesses intimidated, and that the release of confidential information has compromised cases,” Chidi wrote. “Judge Ural Glanville has, I am told by staff, been working feverishly behind the scenes over the last two weeks to manage the unfolding disaster.”
LockBitSupp also denied assertions made by the U.K.’s NCA that LockBit did not delete stolen data as promised when victims agreed to pay a ransom. The accusation is an explosive one because nobody will pay a ransom if they don’t believe the ransomware group will hold up its end of the bargain.
The ransomware group leader also confirmed information first reported here last week, that federal investigators managed to hack LockBit by exploiting a known vulnerability in PHP, a scripting language that is widely used in Web development.
“Due to my personal negligence and irresponsibility I relaxed and did not update PHP in time,” LockBitSupp wrote. “As a result of which access was gained to the two main servers where this version of PHP was installed.”
LockBitSupp’s FBI letter said the group kept copies of its stolen victim data on servers that did not use PHP, and that consequently it was able to retain copies of files stolen from victims. The letter also listed links to multiple new instances of LockBit dark net websites, including the leak page listing Fulton County’s new countdown timer.
LockBit’s new data leak site promises to release stolen Fulton County data on March 2, 2024, unless paid a ransom demand.
“Even after the FBI hack, the stolen data will be published on the blog, there is no chance of destroying the stolen data without payment,” LockBitSupp wrote. “All FBI actions are aimed at destroying the reputation of my affiliate program, my demoralization, they want me to leave and quit my job, they want to scare me because they can not find and eliminate me, I can not be stopped, you can not even hope, as long as I am alive I will continue to do pentest with postpaid.”
In January 2024, LockBitSupp told XSS forum members he was disappointed the FBI hadn’t offered a reward for his doxing and/or arrest, and that in response he was placing a bounty on his own head — offering $10 million to anyone who could discover his real name.
After the NCA and FBI seized LockBit’s site, the group’s homepage was retrofitted with a blog entry titled, “Who is LockBitSupp? The $10M question.” The teaser made use of LockBit’s own countdown timer, and suggested the real identity of LockBitSupp would soon be revealed.
However, after the countdown timer expired the page was replaced with a taunting message from the feds, but it included no new information about LockBitSupp’s identity.
On Feb. 21, the U.S. Department of State announced rewards totaling up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of anyone participating in LockBit ransomware attacks. The State Department said $10 million of that is for information on LockBit’s leaders, and up to $5 million is offered for information on affiliates.
In an interview with the malware-focused Twitter/X account Vx-Underground, LockBit staff asserted that authorities had arrested a couple of small-time players in their operation, and that investigators still do not know the real-life identities of the core LockBit members, or that of their leader.
“They assert the FBI / NCA UK / EUROPOL do not know their information,” Vx-Underground wrote. “They state they are willing to double the bounty of $10,000,000. They state they will place a $20,000,000 bounty of their own head if anyone can dox them.”
In the weeks leading up to the FBI/NCA takedown, LockBitSupp became embroiled in a number of high-profile personal and business disputes on the Russian cybercrime forums.
Earlier this year, someone used LockBit ransomware to infect the networks of AN-Security, a venerated 30-year-old security and technology company based in St. Petersburg, Russia. This violated the golden rule for cybercriminals based in Russia and former soviet nations that make up the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is that attacking your own citizens in those countries is the surest way to get arrested and prosecuted by local authorities.
LockBitSupp later claimed the attacker had used a publicly leaked, older version of LockBit to compromise systems at AN-Security, and said the attack was an attempt to smear their reputation by a rival ransomware group known as “Clop.” But the incident no doubt prompted closer inspection of LockBitSupp’s activities by Russian authorities.
Then in early February, the administrator of the Russian-language cybercrime forum XSS said LockBitSupp had threatened to have him killed after the ransomware group leader was banned by the community. LockBitSupp was excommunicated from XSS after he refused to pay an arbitration amount ordered by the forum administrator. That dispute related to a complaint from another forum member who said LockBitSupp recently stiffed him on his promised share of an unusually large ransomware payout.
A posted by the XSS administrator saying LockBitSupp wanted him dead.
KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from LockBitSupp at the ToX instant messenger ID listed in his letter to the FBI. LockBitSupp declined to elaborate on the unreleased documents from Fulton County, saying the files will be available for everyone to see in a few days.
LockBitSupp said his team was still negotiating with Fulton County when the FBI seized their servers, which is why the county has been granted a time extension. He also denied threatening to kill the XSS administrator.
“I have not threatened to kill the XSS administrator, he is blatantly lying, this is to cause self-pity and damage my reputation,” LockBitSupp told KrebsOnSecurity. “It is not necessary to kill him to punish him, there are more humane methods and he knows what they are.”
Asked why he was so certain the FBI doesn’t know his real-life identity, LockBitSupp was more precise.
“I’m not sure the FBI doesn’t know who I am,” he said. “I just believe they will never find me.”
It seems unlikely that the FBI’s seizure of LockBit’s infrastructure was somehow an effort to stave off the disclosure of Fulton County’s data, as LockBitSupp maintains. For one thing, Europol said the takedown was the result of a months-long infiltration of the ransomware group.
Also, in reporting on the attack’s disruption to the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Feb. 14, CNN reported that by then the intrusion by LockBit had persisted for nearly two and a half weeks.
Finally, if the NCA and FBI really believed that LockBit never deleted victim data, they had to assume LockBit would still have at least one copy of all their stolen data hidden somewhere safe.
Fulton County is still trying to recover systems and restore services affected by the ransomware attack. “Fulton County continues to make substantial progress in restoring its systems following the recent ransomware incident resulting in service outages,” reads the latest statement from the county on Feb. 22. “Since the start of this incident, our team has been working tirelessly to bring services back up.”
Update, Feb. 29, 3:22 p.m. ET: Just hours after this story ran, LockBit changed its countdown timer for Fulton County saying they had until the morning of Feb. 29 (today) to pay a ransonm demand. When the official deadline neared today, Fulton County’s listing was removed from LockBit’s victim shaming website. Asked about the removal of the listing, LockBit’s leader “LockBitSupp” told KrebsOnSecurity that Fulton County paid a ransom demand. County officials have scheduled a press conference on the ransomware attack at 4:15 p.m. ET today.
It's just been a joy to watch the material produced by the NCA and friends following the LockBit takedown this week. So much good stuff from the agencies themselves, not just content but high quality trolling too. Then there's the whole ecosystem of memes that have since emerged and provided endless hours of entertainment 😊 I'm sure we'll see a lot more come out of this yet and inevitably there's seized material that will still be providing value to further investigations years from now. Good job folks!
I've been getting a lot of those "your parcel couldn't be delivered" phishing attacks lately and if you're a human with a phone, you probably have been too. Just as a brief reminder, they look like this:
These get through all the technical controls that exist at my telco and they land smack bang in my SMS inbox. However, I don't fall for the scams because I look for the warning signs: a sense of urgency, fear of missing out, and strange URLs that look nothing like any parcel delivery service I know of. They have a pretty rough go of convincing me they're from Australia Post by putting "auspost" somewhere or other within each link, but I'm a smart human so I don't fall for this (that's a joke, read why humans are bad at URLs).
However... I am expecting a parcel. It's well into the 2020's and post COVID so I'm always expecting a parcel, because that's just how we buy stuff these days. And so, when I received the following SMS earlier this week I was expecting a parcel and I was expecting phishing attacks:
So... which is it? Parcel or phish? Let's see what the people say:
Referring to the parent tweet, is this message legit and should I pay the duty and taxes?
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) February 20, 2024
Whoa - that's an 87% "dodgy AF" vote from over 4,000 respondents so yeah, that's pretty emphatic. Why such an overwhelmingly suspicious crowd? Let's break that message down into 7 "dodgy AF" signs:
And so, I was with the 87% of other people. However... I was expecting a package. From FedEx. Coming from outside Australia so it may attract duty and taxes. And I really want to get this package because it's a new 3D printer from Prusa, and they're awesome!
There's a sage piece of advice that's always relevant in these cases and it's very simple: if in doubt, go the website in question and verify the request yourself. So, I went to the purchase confirmation from Prusa, found the shipping details and followed the link to the FedEx website. Now it was simply a matter of finding the section that talks about tax, except...
Dodgy. A. F.
I went all through that page and couldn't find a single reference to duty, nor for anything tax related. Try as I might, I couldn't establish the authenticity of the SMS by going directly to the (alleged) source. But what I could easily establish is that if you follow that link in the SMS, you can change the tracking number, the customer name and the amount to absolutely anything you want!
This is all done by simply changing the URL parameters; I'm not modifying the browser DOM or intercepting traffic or doing anything fancy, it's literally just query string parameter tampering reflected XSS style. This feels like every phishing site ever, not a payment service run by Australia's largest bank. Seriously, BPOINT is provided by the Commonwealth Bank and after the experience above, I'm at the point of reaching out to them and making a disclosure. Except that this is how the system was obviously designed to work and it's a completely parallel issue to phishy FedEx SMSs. Speaking of which, the very next morning I got another one from the same sender:
I don't know if this makes it better or worse 🤦♂️ Let's just jump into the highlights, both good and bad:
It's quite unbelievable what they've done with the link because it makes the SMS entirely unactionable. It's impossible to click anywhere and pay the money. And while I'm here, why are all the query string parameter names now capitalised? It's like there's a completely different (broken) process somewhere generating these links. Or scammers just aren't consistent...
Because "dodgy AF" is the prevailing theme, I needed to dig deeper, so I searched for the 1800 number. One of the first results was for a Reverse Australia page for that number which upon reading the first 3 comments, perfectly summed up the sentiment so far:
And the more you read both on that site and other top links in the search results, the more people are totally confused about the legitimacy of the messages. There's only one thing to do - call FedEx. Not by the number in the (still potentially phishy) SMS, but rather via the number on their website. So, click the "Support" menu item, down to "Customer Support" and we end up here:
I'll save you the pain of reading the response that ensued, suffice to say that it only referred to email communications and boiled down to suggesting you read the domain of the sender. But I did manage to pin the system down on a phone number which as you'll see, is completely different to the one in the SMS messages:
So, I call the number and follow the voice prompts, selecting options via the keypad to route me through to the duty and taxes section. But eventually, several steps deep into the process, the system stops responding to key presses! "1" doesn't work and neither does "2" so without a response, the same message just repeats. But it does offer an alternative and suggestions I call 132610. That's the number I called in the first place to get stuck in this infinite loop!
I try again, this time following a different series of prompts that eventually asks for a tracking number and then proceeds to tell me precisely what the website already does! But it also provides the option to speak to a customer service operator and I'm actually promptly put through. The operator explains that my shipment is valued at US$799 which converts to AU$1,215.97 and it therefore subject to some inbound fees. "Great, but how much and does it match what's in the phishy SMSs I've received?" He promises someone will call be back shortly...
And then, out of the blue 3 days after the initial phishy SMS arrived, an email landed in my inbox:
The dollar figure, the BPOINT address and the messaging all lined up with the SMSs, but that's just merely correlation and if someone had both my phone number and email address they could easily attempt to phish both with the same details. But then, I looked at the attachment to the email and found this:
IT'S THE MISSING LINK!!!
My complete Prusa invoice was attached along with the order number, price and shipping details. In other words, 87% of you were wrong 😲
On a more serious note, Aussies alone are losing north of AU$3B annually to scams, and that's obviously only a drop in the ocean compared to the global scale of this problem. Our Australian Communications and Media Authority body (ACMA) recently reported 336M blocked scam SMSs and technical controls like these are obviously great, but absent from their reporting was the number of scam messages they didn't block. There's an easy explanation for this omission: they simply don't know how many are sent. But if I were to take a guess, they've merely blocked the tip of the iceberg. This is why in addition to technical controls, we reply on human controls which means helping people identify the patterns of a scam: requests for money, a sense of urgency, grammar and casing that's a bit off, odd looking URLs. You know, stuff like this:
What makes this situation so ridiculous is that while we're all watching for scammers attempting to imitate legitimate organisations, FedEx is out there imitating scammers! Here we are in the era of burgeoning AI-driven scams that are becoming increasingly hard for humans to identify, and FedEx is like "here, hold my beer" as they one-up the scammers at their own game and do a perfect job of being completely indistinguishable from them.
Ah well, as I ultimately lament in these situations, it's a good time to be in the industry 😊
A new data leak that appears to have come from one of China’s top private cybersecurity firms provides a rare glimpse into the commercial side of China’s many state-sponsored hacking groups. Experts say the leak illustrates how Chinese government agencies increasingly are contracting out foreign espionage campaigns to the nation’s burgeoning and highly competitive cybersecurity industry.
A marketing slide deck promoting i-SOON’s Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) capabilities.
A large cache of more than 500 documents published to GitHub last week indicate the records come from i-SOON, a technology company headquartered in Shanghai that is perhaps best known for providing cybersecurity training courses throughout China. But the leaked documents, which include candid employee chat conversations and images, show a less public side of i-SOON, one that frequently initiates and sustains cyberespionage campaigns commissioned by various Chinese government agencies.
The leaked documents suggest i-SOON employees were responsible for a raft of cyber intrusions over many years, infiltrating government systems in the United Kingdom and countries throughout Asia. Although the cache does not include raw data stolen from cyber espionage targets, it features numerous documents listing the level of access gained and the types of data exposed in each intrusion.
Security experts who reviewed the leaked data say they believe the information is legitimate, and that i-SOON works closely with China’s Ministry of Public Security and the military. In 2021, the Sichuan provincial government named i-SOON as one of “the top 30 information security companies.”
“The leak provides some of the most concrete details seen publicly to date, revealing the maturing nature of China’s cyber espionage ecosystem,” said Dakota Cary, a China-focused consultant at the security firm SentinelOne. “It shows explicitly how government targeting requirements drive a competitive marketplace of independent contractor hackers-for-hire.”
Mei Danowski is a former intelligence analyst and China expert who now writes about her research in a Substack publication called Natto Thoughts. Danowski said i-SOON has achieved the highest secrecy classification that a non-state-owned company can receive, which qualifies the company to conduct classified research and development related to state security.
i-SOON’s “business services” webpage states that the company’s offerings include public security, anti-fraud, blockchain forensics, enterprise security solutions, and training. Danowski said that in 2013, i-SOON established a department for research on developing new APT network penetration methods.
APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat, a term that generally refers to state-sponsored hacking groups. Indeed, among the documents apparently leaked from i-SOON is a sales pitch slide boldly highlighting the hacking prowess of the company’s “APT research team” (see screenshot above).
i-SOON CEO Wu Haibo, in 2011. Image: nattothoughts.substack.com.
The leaked documents included a lengthy chat conversation between the company’s founders, who repeatedly discuss flagging sales and the need to secure more employees and government contracts. Danowski said the CEO of i-SOON, Wu Haibo (“Shutdown” in the leaked chats) is a well-known first-generation red hacker or “Honker,” and an early member of Green Army — the very first Chinese hacktivist group founded in 1997. Mr. Haibo has not yet responded to a request for comment.
In October 2023, Danowski detailed how i-SOON became embroiled in a software development contract dispute when it was sued by a competing Chinese cybersecurity company called Chengdu 404. In September 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments against multiple Chengdu 404 employees, charging that the company was a facade that hid more than a decade’s worth of cyber intrusions attributed to a threat actor group known as “APT 41.”
Danowski said the existence of this legal dispute suggests that Chengdu 404 and i-SOON have or at one time had a business relationship, and that one company likely served as a subcontractor to the other.
“From what they chat about we can see this is a very competitive industry, where companies in this space are constantly poaching each others’ employees and tools,” Danowski said. “The infosec industry is always trying to distinguish [the work] of one APT group from another. But that’s getting harder to do.”
It remains unclear if i-SOON’s work has earned it a unique APT designation. But Will Thomas, a cyber threat intelligence researcher at Equinix, found an Internet address in the leaked data that corresponds to a domain flagged in a 2019 Citizen Lab report about one-click mobile phone exploits that were being used to target groups in Tibet. The 2019 report referred to the threat actor behind those attacks as an APT group called Poison Carp.
Several images and chat records in the data leak suggest i-SOON’s clients periodically gave the company a list of targets they wanted to infiltrate, but sometimes employees confused the instructions. One screenshot shows a conversation in which an employee tells his boss they’ve just hacked one of the universities on their latest list, only to be told that the victim in question was not actually listed as a desired target.
The leaked chats show i-SOON continuously tried to recruit new talent by hosting a series of hacking competitions across China. It also performed charity work, and sought to engage employees and sustain morale with various team-building events.
However, the chats include multiple conversations between employees commiserating over long hours and low pay. The overall tone of the discussions indicates employee morale was quite low and that the workplace environment was fairly toxic. In several of the conversations, i-SOON employees openly discuss with their bosses how much money they just lost gambling online with their mobile phones while at work.
Danowski believes the i-SOON data was probably leaked by one of those disgruntled employees.
“This was released the first working day after the Chinese New Year,” Danowski said. “Definitely whoever did this planned it, because you can’t get all this information all at once.”
SentinelOne’s Cary said he came to the same conclusion, noting that the Protonmail account tied to the GitHub profile that published the records was registered a month before the leak, on January 15, 2024.
China’s much vaunted Great Firewall not only lets the government control and limit what citizens can access online, but this distributed spying apparatus allows authorities to block data on Chinese citizens and companies from ever leaving the country.
As a result, China enjoys a remarkable information asymmetry vis-a-vis virtually all other industrialized nations. Which is why this apparent data leak from i-SOON is such a rare find for Western security researchers.
“I was so excited to see this,” Cary said. “Every day I hope for data leaks coming out of China.”
That information asymmetry is at the heart of the Chinese government’s cyberwarfare goals, according to a 2023 analysis by Margin Research performed on behalf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
“In the area of cyberwarfare, the western governments see cyberspace as a ‘fifth domain’ of warfare,” the Margin study observed. “The Chinese, however, look at cyberspace in the broader context of information space. The ultimate objective is, not ‘control’ of cyberspace, but control of information, a vision that dominates China’s cyber operations.”
The National Cybersecurity Strategy issued by the White House last year singles out China as the biggest cyber threat to U.S. interests. While the United States government does contract certain aspects of its cyber operations to companies in the private sector, it does not follow China’s example in promoting the wholesale theft of state and corporate secrets for the commercial benefit of its own private industries.
Dave Aitel, a co-author of the Margin Research report and former computer scientist at the U.S. National Security Agency, said it’s nice to see that Chinese cybersecurity firms have to deal with all of the same contracting headaches facing U.S. companies seeking work with the federal government.
“This leak just shows there’s layers of contractors all the way down,” Aitel said. “It’s pretty fun to see the Chinese version of it.”
U.S. and U.K. authorities have seized the darknet websites run by LockBit, a prolific and destructive ransomware group that has claimed more than 2,000 victims worldwide and extorted over $120 million in payments. Instead of listing data stolen from ransomware victims who didn’t pay, LockBit’s victim shaming website now offers free recovery tools, as well as news about arrests and criminal charges involving LockBit affiliates.
Investigators used the existing design on LockBit’s victim shaming website to feature press releases and free decryption tools.
Dubbed “Operation Cronos,” the law enforcement action involved the seizure of nearly three-dozen servers; the arrest of two alleged LockBit members; the unsealing of two indictments; the release of a free LockBit decryption tool; and the freezing of more than 200 cryptocurrency accounts thought to be tied to the gang’s activities.
LockBit members have executed attacks against thousands of victims in the United States and around the world, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). First surfacing in September 2019, the gang is estimated to have made hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in ransom demands, and extorted over $120 million in ransom payments.
LockBit operated as a ransomware-as-a-service group, wherein the ransomware gang takes care of everything from the bulletproof hosting and domains to the development and maintenance of the malware. Meanwhile, affiliates are solely responsible for finding new victims, and can reap 60 to 80 percent of any ransom amount ultimately paid to the group.
A statement on Operation Cronos from the European police agency Europol said the months-long infiltration resulted in the compromise of LockBit’s primary platform and other critical infrastructure, including the takedown of 34 servers in the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, France, Switzerland, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Europol said two suspected LockBit actors were arrested in Poland and Ukraine, but no further information has been released about those detained.
The DOJ today unsealed indictments against two Russian men alleged to be active members of LockBit. The government says Russian national Artur Sungatov used LockBit ransomware against victims in manufacturing, logistics, insurance and other companies throughout the United States.
Ivan Gennadievich Kondratyev, a.k.a. “Bassterlord,” allegedly deployed LockBit against targets in the United States, Singapore, Taiwan, and Lebanon. Kondratyev is also charged (PDF) with three criminal counts arising from his alleged use of the Sodinokibi (aka “REvil“) ransomware variant to encrypt data, exfiltrate victim information, and extort a ransom payment from a corporate victim based in Alameda County, California.
With the indictments of Sungatov and Kondratyev, a total of five LockBit affiliates now have been officially charged. In May 2023, U.S. authorities unsealed indictments against two alleged LockBit affiliates, Mikhail “Wazawaka” Matveev and Mikhail Vasiliev.
Vasiliev, 35, of Bradford, Ontario, Canada, is in custody in Canada awaiting extradition to the United States (the complaint against Vasiliev is at this PDF). Matveev remains at large, presumably still in Russia. In January 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published Who is the Network Access Broker ‘Wazawaka,’ which followed clues from Wazawaka’s many pseudonyms and contact details on the Russian-language cybercrime forums back to a 31-year-old Mikhail Matveev from Abaza, RU.
An FBI wanted poster for Matveev.
In June 2023, Russian national Ruslan Magomedovich Astamirov was charged in New Jersey for his participation in the LockBit conspiracy, including the deployment of LockBit against victims in Florida, Japan, France, and Kenya. Astamirov is currently in custody in the United States awaiting trial.
LockBit was known to have recruited affiliates that worked with multiple ransomware groups simultaneously, and it’s unclear what impact this takedown may have on competing ransomware affiliate operations. The security firm ProDaft said on Twitter/X that the infiltration of LockBit by investigators provided “in-depth visibility into each affiliate’s structures, including ties with other notorious groups such as FIN7, Wizard Spider, and EvilCorp.”
In a lengthy thread about the LockBit takedown on the Russian-language cybercrime forum XSS, one of the gang’s leaders said the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) had infiltrated its servers using a known vulnerability in PHP, a scripting language that is widely used in Web development.
Several denizens of XSS wondered aloud why the PHP flaw was not flagged by LockBit’s vaunted “Bug Bounty” program, which promised a financial reward to affiliates who could find and quietly report any security vulnerabilities threatening to undermine LockBit’s online infrastructure.
This prompted several XSS members to start posting memes taunting the group about the security failure.
“Does it mean that the FBI provided a pentesting service to the affiliate program?,” one denizen quipped. “Or did they decide to take part in the bug bounty program? :):)”
Federal investigators also appear to be trolling LockBit members with their seizure notices. LockBit’s data leak site previously featured a countdown timer for each victim organization listed, indicating the time remaining for the victim to pay a ransom demand before their stolen files would be published online. Now, the top entry on the shaming site is a countdown timer until the public doxing of “LockBitSupp,” the unofficial spokesperson or figurehead for the LockBit gang.
“Who is LockbitSupp?” the teaser reads. “The $10m question.”
In January 2024, LockBitSupp told XSS forum members he was disappointed the FBI hadn’t offered a reward for his doxing and/or arrest, and that in response he was placing a bounty on his own head — offering $10 million to anyone who could discover his real name.
“My god, who needs me?,” LockBitSupp wrote on Jan. 22, 2024. “There is not even a reward out for me on the FBI website. By the way, I want to use this chance to increase the reward amount for a person who can tell me my full name from USD 1 million to USD 10 million. The person who will find out my name, tell it to me and explain how they were able to find it out will get USD 10 million. Please take note that when looking for criminals, the FBI uses unclear wording offering a reward of UP TO USD 10 million; this means that the FBI can pay you USD 100, because technically, it’s an amount UP TO 10 million. On the other hand, I am willing to pay USD 10 million, no more and no less.”
Mark Stockley, cybersecurity evangelist at the security firm Malwarebytes, said the NCA is obviously trolling the LockBit group and LockBitSupp.
“I don’t think this is an accident—this is how ransomware groups talk to each other,” Stockley said. “This is law enforcement taking the time to enjoy its moment, and humiliate LockBit in its own vernacular, presumably so it loses face.”
In a press conference today, the FBI said Operation Cronos included investigative assistance from the Gendarmerie-C3N in France; the State Criminal Police Office L-K-A and Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany; Fedpol and Zurich Cantonal Police in Switzerland; the National Police Agency in Japan; the Australian Federal Police; the Swedish Police Authority; the National Bureau of Investigation in Finland; the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and the National Police in the Netherlands.
The Justice Department said victims targeted by LockBit should contact the FBI at https://lockbitvictims.ic3.gov/ to determine whether affected systems can be successfully decrypted. In addition, the Japanese Police, supported by Europol, have released a recovery tool designed to recover files encrypted by the LockBit 3.0 Black Ransomware.
FreshRSS 