A ransomware group paid the price for backing Russia

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

That gravitational pull is particularly fraught in Russia, where the borders between hackers and the Russian intelligence services are sometimes porous, and one group in particular has been made to pay for its allegiance to the Putin regime.

On Friday, the notorious ransomware gang Conti surprised many observers by explicitly casting its lot with Putin’s military agenda, declaring “full support” for the Russian government and threatening to mount attacks on critical infrastructure of any adversaries launching cyberattacks against Russia.

(snip)

Two days later, on February 27th, Conti’s posturing came to backfire spectacularly when an anonymous individual leaked a cache of chat logs from the organization, revealing a huge amount of previously unpublished information about the ransomware group’s internal workings.

The leaked data contains over a year’s worth of chat logs from the open-source instant messaging service Jabber, containing messages between at least 20 chat handles presumed to belong to members of the gang. Among other things, these logs seem to confirm a chain of command linking Conti to Russian intelligence agencies. According to Christo Grozev, executive director of open-source intelligence research group Bellingcat, the chat logs show that members of Conti tried to hack a Bellingcat contributor on the orders of Russia’s main internal security service, the FSB.

(snip)

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/28/22955246/conti-ransomware-russia-ukraine-chat-logs-leaked

[ffr]

1. Good.

Any hope of arresting the gang would be awesome. I hate those fuckers!

[Ford_Prefect]

2. Imagine...

[dalton99a]

3. All roads lead to Putin

[lagomorph777]

4. I imagine US intel will find this very interesting.