UPDATED: UK leads takedown of LockBit ransomware gang’s website

By Howard Solomon for IT World Canada
Tuesday, February 20, 2024

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In the short term the law enforcement take down of LockBit will have a substantial impact on their operations, said Yossi Rachman, senior director of research at Semperis. In time, he added, they will resurface, likely under a different name, with current members likely joining or establishing other successful gangs. “While gangs such as LockBit boast daily about the names of their victims and have had the upper hand in the ransomware scourge, make no mistake that there is a global hunt underway for ransomware gangs and ring leaders. The technical people in these rings are still prone to mistakes which lead to takedowns like this one.”

Ilia Kolochenko, CEO and Chief Architect at ImmuniWeb, wondered if law enforcement agencies will pass the information about victims, data breaches and paid (or non-paid) ransoms to other national authorities to probe the victims of LockBit. He noted that the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control says paying ransoms may violate U.S. sanctions. It now has a good opportunity to review all payments made to LockBit, he said. Likewise, national data processing agreements under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may also want to compare a list of data breaches reported by victims and the breaches for which a ransom was paid to LockBit, he said. This may lead to investigations against breached companies who silently paid a ransom to conceal a data breach, without reporting it anywhere as required by law, Kolochenko said. Read Full Article