A Russian citizen has been extradited from South Korea to the United States to face charges related to his alleged role in the Phobos ransomware opera

Russian suspected Phobos ransomware admin extradited to US over $16M extortion

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2024-11-20 05:30:02

A Russian citizen has been extradited from South Korea to the United States to face charges related to his alleged role in the Phobos ransomware operation.

According to American prosecutors [PDF], since November 2020 the Phobos crew let criminals use its Windows ransomware for free to infect others, then charged those crooks $300 per decryption key, which were then resold to victims for amounts determined by the intruders.

The amount of ransom these extortionists were demanding was relatively small - between $12,000 to $300,000 per victim - though the Feds claim that in total the code was used to extort around $16 million from organizations and that it was Ptitsyn who provided crucial technical support.

"Each deployment of Phobos ransomware was assigned a unique alphanumeric string in order to match it to the corresponding decryption key, and each affiliate was directed to pay the decryption key fee to a cryptocurrency wallet unique to that affiliate," the US Justice Dept said in a statement this week.

"From December 2021 to April 2024, the decryption key fees were then transferred from the unique affiliate cryptocurrency wallet to a wallet controlled by Ptitsyn," it is claimed.