US DOJ Fees Ukrainian Nationwide with Ransomware Assault on Kaseya

DOJ Files Two Charges Linked to Ransomware Assaults
Yaroslav Vasinskyi, a 22-year-old Ukrainian national, and Yevgeniy Polyanin, a Russian national, have been accused by the Division of Justice (DOJ) of carrying out ransomware attacks against several victims. Among the expenses is an attack on the multinational IT company Kaseya in July 2021. The inquiry is currently being conducted primarily out of the FBI’s Dallas and Jackson field offices.

In reaction to the indictments, the two defendants broke into the victims’ internal computer networks and utilised ransomware to steal sensitive data. “Cybercrime is a critical menace to our nation—to our private security, to the health of our financial system, and to our nationwide safety,” said legal expert Normal Garland. Our message is clear as of right now. America and its partners will use every effort to track down the people responsible for ransomware attacks, bring them to jail, and retrieve the money they have taken from their victims.

The DOJ also disclosed Polyanin’s involvement in money laundering. If found guilty, he and Vasinskyi will be punished severely.

On the victims’ computers, the defendants are said to have left digital notes in the form of text files. These notes contained a URL that led to the open-source privacy community known as Tor as well as a link to a website address that was available to the public. The victims received a ransom demand after accessing both websites, along with an invitation to use a digital foreign exchange address to pay the extortion. The defendants provided the decryption key and permitted access to the data if the victim paid the amount demanded in ransom.