A collaborative law enforcement operation between French and Ukrainian authorities has led to the arrests of several suspected cybercriminals behind a major ransomware operation known as Egregor, sources stated on Wednesday.
The arrests of multiple Ukrainian nationals by Ukrainian and French authorities, which occurred last week, came as the group's data-leak site also suffered an outage, security firm Digital Shadows reports. While the one-two punch will likely hobble the operation in the short term, ransomware operations usually bounce back after a time.
These arrests underscore the growing pattern of law enforcement agencies' success in pursuing charges against some cybercrime gangs, says Jamie Hart, cyber threat intelligence analyst for Digital Shadows.
"Since the beginning of 2021, seeing law enforcement coordinate to take down NetWalker, take down Emotet, and now they have taken down Egregor — it shows the cooperation is improving and law enforcement are getting the hang of this," she says.
Officials' arrests of several people suspected of ties to the Egregor ransomware-as-a-service operation is the latest success. In January, the US Department of Justice arrested a Canadian national and seized almost $500,000 in cryptocurrency as part of their investigation into the Netwalker ransomware operation. A day earlier, an international alliance of law enforcement agencies shut down the Emotet botnet by taking over the infrastructure its operators used.
Yet, even with a handful of major operations disrupted, large ransomware campaigns will likely not be hobbled for long. When authorities and private industry collaborated to take down the Tr ..
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