LockBit - The world's most dangerous hacker gang was destroyed

 Specifically, the British National Crime Agency (NCA), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the European Union Police Agency (Europol) coordinated to carry out a special campaign called Cronos. and destroyed LockBit.

Previously, LockBit regularly updated its victim "collection" on its website with a countdown timer until the deadline to pay the ransom. From February 20, after LockBit was taken down, this page displayed a notice from the authorities that they were controlling the website.

In addition to controlling the homepage, NCA also grasped the infrastructure that allowed the gang to manage and deploy technology for extortion, helping victims decrypt stolen data.

On X, VX-underground - an organization specializing in cybersecurity research, said that LockBit has confirmed that the FBI attacked servers running on the gang's PHP programming language. However, LockBit revealed that the authorities have not yet controlled the backup servers that do not use the PHP language of this hacker organization.

Data from Secureworks shows that LockBit holds a 25% share of the global ransomware market, with Blackcat second with a market share of about 8.5%.

LockBit operates the organization as a business and first became known to the world in 2020 when malware of the same name was found on Russian-language cybercrime forums.

LockBit and its affiliates have conducted a series of large-scale cyber attacks, encrypting sensitive data of many businesses and then forcing victims to pay ransom to get data access keys, or avoid Confidential information is made public.

This group once said they operated entirely non-politically, only interested in money, but strictly prohibited members from attacking medical organizations, such as cardiovascular centers, neurosurgery departments, obstetrics hospitals.

In the US alone, LockBit has conducted more than 1,700 attacks, targeting almost every industry from food, schools, transportation to financial services and government agencies.

Kareem Winters

Update 21 February 2024