The US government downed a Vietnamese company, which it described as a darknet cryptocurrency “mixing” service, for laundering more than $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency, and processing bitcoin allegedly used by the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), the US Justice Department said on Wednesday.
<p><span>The Justice Department announced today a coordinated international takedown of ChipMixer, a darknet cryptocurrency “mixing” service responsible for laundering more than $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency, between 2017 and the present, in furtherance of, among other activities, ransomware, darknet market, fraud, cryptocurrency heists and other hacking schemes. The operation involved U.S. federal law enforcement’s court-authorized seizure of two domains that directed users to the ChipMixer service and one Github account, as well as the German Federal Criminal Police’s (the Bundeskriminalamt) seizure of the ChipMixer back-end servers and more than $46 million in cryptocurrency. </span></p>
Businesses can breathe a little easier now that one of the world’s top five ransomware networks, the Hive, has been infiltrated and disbanded by the FBI.
FBI covertly infiltrated the Hive network, which has targeted more than 1,500 victims in over 80 countries around the world, and thwarting over $130 million in ransom demands.