Cybersecurity expert turns cybercriminal, pleading guilty to 'conspiracy to deploy ransomware'

Getting hit with ransomware is seldom short of a nightmare situation. Finding out the call might just be coming from inside the house definitely kicks both the fear and the frustration up a notch.

Three men who had previously worked in the cybersecurity industry have pleaded guilty to conspiring to deploy ransomware. Between April 2023 and November 2023, the group deployed Blackcat/ALPHV ransomware against a number of victims, extorting just one of these for $1.2 million in Bitcoin, according to the US Department of Justice.

The accused are Ryan Goldberg of Georgia, Kevin Martin of Texas, and Florida man Angelo Martino. Law enforcement has since seized $10 million worth of assets from Martino alone. This includes "digital currency, vehicles, a food truck, and a luxury fishing boat that Martino obtained using proceeds of the offense or acquired as a result of the offense."

While working as a ransomware negotiator for a cyber incident response company back in April 2023, Martino reportedly began to feed confidential information on five different ransomware victims to the very bad actors holding them to ransom. This info included the victim's insurance policy limits, thereby allowing the BlackCat bad actors to maximise the monetary amounts they were asking for.

After being paid by the attackers for his insider information, Martino allegedly began to launch ransomware attacks himself. He has since pleaded guilty to "one count of conspiracy to obstruct, delay or affect commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce by extortion." Martino's alleged co-conspirators, Martin and Goldberg, pleaded guilty to the same charge last year. Each man faces the same maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

BlackCat can refer to the ransomware written in Rust itself, or the threat actor group that used it. The 'cyber gang' also used the moniker ALPHV. The group previously hit Bandai Namco back in 2022, and Western Digital in 2023, though it is apparently now completely defunct.

That's in part due to the FBI cyber division's touted ransomware crackdown. That said, the Guardian reported that ransomware payments fell by $813 million globally in 2024 alone due to increased law enforcement efforts around the world, in addition to victims simply refusing to pay.

Most recently, we've seen hacker group ShinyHunters hold Rockstar to ransom mere months before GTA VI is set to launch. The deadline has since passed without Rockstar paying up, revealing ShinyHunters had little leverage in the first place.

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