Arrest Made
On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced the indictment of Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, a Canadian national who is suspected of working as a NetWalker affiliate and helping to conduct a ransomware attack against a victim in Florida. Vachon-Desjardins is alleged to have made $27.6 million from infecting victims with the NetWalker ransomware.
Vachon-Desjardins has been charged with intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison, the federal indictment notes.
Bulgarian authorities have seized the servers used to support the darknet sites used by NetWalker ransomware affiliates to provide payment instructions and communicate with victims, according to the Justice Department.
Law Enforcement Aims to Take Down Netwalker Ransomware
The Department of Justice has so far charged one Canadian national and seized nearly $500,000 in relation to Netwalker ransomware.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced a coordinated law enforcement operation to disrupt Netwalker, an advanced form of ransomware.
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Netwalker has targeted a range of victims including businesses, municipalities, hospitals, law enforcement, emergency services, school districts, colleges, and universities, the DoJ reports. Its operators have specifically targeted the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Attackers who deploy Netwalker, which operates in a ransomware-as-a-service model, usually gain access to a target machine days or weeks before a ransom note is delivered, officials say. During this time, they escalate privileges and spread Netwalker across devices. Once they have infected enough computers, they send a ransom note.
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Phishing email designed to look like a message from the New York State Department of Labor (Source: Abnormal Security)
A recently uncovered phishing campaign is spoofing messages from the New York State Department of Labor, claiming to offer $600 as part of a COVID-19 relief program, according to researchers at Abnormal Security. The goal is to harvest personally identifiable information.
This phishing campaign, which appears to have started earlier this month, may have targeted 100,000 Microsoft Office 365 accounts so far, the security firm reports. The attackers are taking advantage of the current global health crisis by crafting a scam that revolves around the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact, the researchers note. So, a recipient of this email may be more likely to believe that the government is offering additional relief as the pandemic continues.