LONDON, May 7 (Reuters) – Britain, the U.S. and Australia have sanctioned and unmasked a senior Russian leader of the notorious cybercrime gang LockBit, the British government said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Dmitry Khoroshev will face asset freezes and travel bans after being identified as one of the leaders of LockBit, the ransomware group which has digitally extorted over $1 billion from victims worldwide, it said.<\/p>\n
“These sanctions are hugely significant and show that there is no hiding place for cyber criminals like Dmitry Khoroshev, who wreak havoc across the globe. He was certain he could remain anonymous, but he was wrong,” Graeme Biggar, Director General of Britain’s National Crime Agency, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
LockBit was first disrupted by the NCA, U.S. Department of Justice, FBI and Europol in February, in an unprecedented campaign that saw the gang’s darkweb site hijacked by police and used to leak internal information about the group and the people behind it.<\/p>\n
“In sanctioning one of the leaders of LockBit we are taking direct action against those who continue to threaten global security, while simultaneously exposing the malicious cyber-criminal activity emanating from Russia,” Britain’s Sanctions Minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts data; Lockbit and its affiliates make money by coercing its targets into paying ransom to decrypt or unlock that data with a digital key. The gang’s digital extortion tools have been used against some of the world\u2019s largest organisations.<\/p>\n