Arrests, seizures, dossiers, detentions. These are just some of the ways police around the world have foiled the biggest cybercriminal operations of the past year.
Cybercriminals are very inventive, which has meant law enforcement has had to resort to new and unconventional methods because 2022 has seen some of the most astonishing and ingenious breaches.
From hiding billions of bitcoins under floorboards, to young hackers under the age of 18 breaking into Fortune 500 networks. Since the beginning of the year, more than $3.6 billion in bitcoin has been seized.
Later in the year, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) announced that it had sanctioned decentralized cryptocurrency “mixing” service Tornado Cash for its role in laundering cryptocurrency on its platform.
Tornado Cash, along with others like AlphaBay, allows its customers to hide the origin of their crypto funds when they participate in a transaction in exchange for a fee. It mixes potentially identifiable or contaminated cryptocurrency funds with others to hide the origin and destination of the cryptocurrencies. More than $1.5 billion in proceeds from crimes such as ransomware and fraud have been laundered through Tornado Cash to date, according to estimates.
In August, the U.S. government shared an image of a suspected ransomware operator called Conti, known as “Target,” marking the first time a major member of a ransomware operation has been discovered. The U.S. Department of State said Conti has carried out more than 1,000 ransomware operations against U.S. and international critical infrastructure.
Another group that suffered a devastating blow in 2022 was NetWalker, a ransomware gang that has been linked to several high-profile attacks, including one on the University of California, San Francisco, which paid a ransom demand of more than $1 million. Between August 2019 and January 2021, ransomware attacks involving NetWalker demanded $46 million in ransom payments, according to cryptocurrency analytics firm Chainalysis.
One of the U.S. government’s longest-running cyber cases, the mystery of the missing billions in the dark web drug market Silk Road, has been solved. In November, U.S. federal agents said they had recovered $3.36 billion in bitcoin that was hidden inside a popcorn can under the floorboards at the bottom of a bathroom cabinet in a hacker’s home. Prosecutors filed a case against a Georgia resident named James Zhong, whose plea deal with the feds saw him give up his massive cryptocurrency stash, along with $600,000 in cash and other precious metals.
In October, a Ukrainian national was charged by U.S. officials for his alleged role in the Raccoon Infostealer “malware-as-a-service” operation that infected millions of computers worldwide. Mark Sokolovsky, nicknamed “Raccoonstealer,” was accused of playing a major role as the administrator of malware that prosecutors say was used to steal more than 50 million unique credentials and forms of identification from victims around the world, starting in February 2019. Sokolovsky is charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and identity theft and faces up to 20 years in prison.
The Lapsus$ gang rose to prominence in 2022. A data extortion group that first emerged a year earlier, it quickly claimed a series of high-profile victims, including Okta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Samsung. The gang seemed invincible, but some of its members were arrested in March this year. In a statement, the City of London Police confirmed that seven people aged between 16 and 21 had been arrested in connection with Lapsus$. News of the arrests came shortly after a Bloomberg report revealed that a teenager based in Oxfordshire, UK, is suspected of being the mastermind of the Lapsus$ gang.
In June 2019, Paige Thompson, a former engineer at Amazon’s cloud division, was convicted in a breach that compromised the personal and financial information of 100 million CapitalOne customers. The breach was one of the largest bank robberies in US history. Thompson was accused of using her connections as an Amazon software engineer to hack CapitalOne’s online cloud storage, hosted on Amazon’s servers, and of compromising the cloud storage of several other companies, including Vodafone, Ford, and the Ohio State Motor Vehicle Agency.
These are just a few cases, the list of arrested cyber criminals is a bit longer.
Arrests, seizures, dossiers, detentions. These are just some of the ways police around the world have foiled the biggest cybercriminal operations of the past year.
Cybercriminals are very inventive, which has meant law enforcement has had to resort to new and unconventional methods because 2022 has seen some of the most astonishing and ingenious breaches.
From hiding billions of bitcoins under floorboards, to young hackers under the age of 18 breaking into Fortune 500 networks. Since the beginning of the year, more than $3.6 billion in bitcoin has been seized.
Later in the year, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) announced that it had sanctioned decentralized cryptocurrency “mixing” service Tornado Cash for its role in laundering cryptocurrency on its platform.
Tornado Cash, along with others like AlphaBay, allows its customers to hide the origin of their crypto funds when they participate in a transaction in exchange for a fee. It mixes potentially identifiable or contaminated cryptocurrency funds with others to hide the origin and destination of the cryptocurrencies. More than $1.5 billion in proceeds from crimes such as ransomware and fraud have been laundered through Tornado Cash to date, according to estimates.
In August, the U.S. government shared an image of a suspected ransomware operator called Conti, known as “Target,” marking the first time a major member of a ransomware operation has been discovered. The U.S. Department of State said Conti has carried out more than 1,000 ransomware operations against U.S. and international critical infrastructure.
Another group that suffered a devastating blow in 2022 was NetWalker, a ransomware gang that has been linked to several high-profile attacks, including one on the University of California, San Francisco, which paid a ransom demand of more than $1 million. Between August 2019 and January 2021, ransomware attacks involving NetWalker demanded $46 million in ransom payments, according to cryptocurrency analytics firm Chainalysis.
One of the U.S. government’s longest-running cyber cases, the mystery of the missing billions in the dark web drug market Silk Road, has been solved. In November, U.S. federal agents said they had recovered $3.36 billion in bitcoin that was hidden inside a popcorn can under the floorboards at the bottom of a bathroom cabinet in a hacker’s home. Prosecutors filed a case against a Georgia resident named James Zhong, whose plea deal with the feds saw him give up his massive cryptocurrency stash, along with $600,000 in cash and other precious metals.
In October, a Ukrainian national was charged by U.S. officials for his alleged role in the Raccoon Infostealer “malware-as-a-service” operation that infected millions of computers worldwide. Mark Sokolovsky, nicknamed “Raccoonstealer,” was accused of playing a major role as the administrator of malware that prosecutors say was used to steal more than 50 million unique credentials and forms of identification from victims around the world, starting in February 2019. Sokolovsky is charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and identity theft and faces up to 20 years in prison.
The Lapsus$ gang rose to prominence in 2022. A data extortion group that first emerged a year earlier, it quickly claimed a series of high-profile victims, including Okta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Samsung. The gang seemed invincible, but some of its members were arrested in March this year. In a statement, the City of London Police confirmed that seven people aged between 16 and 21 had been arrested in connection with Lapsus$. News of the arrests came shortly after a Bloomberg report revealed that a teenager based in Oxfordshire, UK, is suspected of being the mastermind of the Lapsus$ gang.
In June 2019, Paige Thompson, a former engineer at Amazon’s cloud division, was convicted in a breach that compromised the personal and financial information of 100 million CapitalOne customers. The breach was one of the largest bank robberies in US history. Thompson was accused of using her connections as an Amazon software engineer to hack CapitalOne’s online cloud storage, hosted on Amazon’s servers, and of compromising the cloud storage of several other companies, including Vodafone, Ford, and the Ohio State Motor Vehicle Agency.
These are just a few cases, the list of arrested cyber criminals is a bit longer