Law Enforcement Bags a Couple of Turkeys. 

Gobbler No. 1: Yaroslav Vasinskyi

I always like to quote the primary source whenever possible, and here the primary soure is:
The United States Department of Justice, Monday, November 8, 2021.

The Justice Department announced today recent actions taken against two foreign nationals charged with deploying Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware to attack businesses and government entities in the United States.

An indictment unsealed today charges Yaroslav Vasinskyi, 22, a Ukrainian national, with conducting ransomware attacks against multiple victims, including the July 2021 attack against Kaseya, a multi-national information technology software company.

This ransomware attack was considered at the time "one of the single largest criminal ransomware sprees in history."  Kaseya is "an international company that remotely controls programs for companies that, in turn, manage internet services for businesses."  In hours of the attack, over 200 networks managed by Kaseya, had been compromised.  Ultimately, "It’s estimated that more than a million individual systems are locked up, ... more than 5,000 attack attempts in 22 countries."

According to the DOJ court filing, "Vasinskyi was allegedly responsible for the July 2 ransomware attack against Kaseya. In the alleged attack against Kaseya, Vasinskyi caused the deployment of malicious Sodinokibi/REvil code throughout a Kaseya product that caused the Kaseya production functionality to deploy REvil ransomware to “endpoints” on Kaseya customer networks. After the remote access to Kaseya endpoints was established, the ransomware was executed on those computers, which resulted in the encryption of data on computers of organizations around the world that used Kaseya software."  The reason the attack against Kaseya was so devastating is Kaseya had infected its own customers through its own product. 

Vasinsky is also charged in another filing "with conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers, substantive counts of damage to protected computers, and conspiracy to commit money laundering."  If this 22 year old young man from the Ukraine is convicted on all counts, he faces up to 115 years in prison.  May all his cellmates have Covid, the yet to be discovered Sigma variant.

Vasinskyi was arrested Oct. 8 in Poland, which maintains an extradition treaty with the United States.  His Russian co-defendant remains in Russia, however.

Gerald Reiff