By James Pearson
LONDON (Reuters) -Lockbit, a notorious cybercrime gang that holds its victims’ data to ransom, has been disrupted in a rare international law enforcement operation by Britain’s National Crime Agency and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a post on the gang’s extortion website on Monday.
“This site is now under the control of the National Crime Agency of the UK, working in close cooperation with the FBI and the international law enforcement task force, ‘Operation Cronos’,” the post said.
An NCA spokesperson confirmed that the agency had disrupted the gang and said the operation was “ongoing and developing”.
Lockbit and its affiliates have hacked some of the world’s largest organisations in recent months. The gang makes money by stealing sensitive data and threatening to leak it if victims fail to pay an extortionate ransom. Its affiliates are like-minded criminal groups that are recruited by the group to wage attacks using Lockbit’s digital extortion tools.
Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts data. Lockbit makes money by coercing its targets into paying ransom to decrypt or unlock that data with a digital key.
“They are the Walmart of ransomware groups, they run it like a business–that’s what makes them different,” said Jon DiMaggio, chief security strategist at Analyst1, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm. “They are arguably the biggest ransomware crew today.”
(Reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Leslie Adler)
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