Romanian law enforcement authorities have arrested a 41-year-old Romanian ransomware affiliate.
While the ransomware gang for which he works remains unknown, the attacker is suspected of being behind some illegal operations such as hacking and stealing sensitive information from the networks of some of the world’s largest companies.
He was arrested on Monday by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) and judicial police officers. Some of the charges that pointed in his direction include unauthorized access to a computer system, unauthorized transmission of computer data, illegal interception of a computer transmission and blackmail.
According to the Romanian National Police, the arrested perpetrator stole a wide range of sensitive information from targets’ systems including financial information of companies, personal data of employees and customer data.
After extracting the data, Europol said: “The suspect would then ask for a sizeable ransom payment in cryptocurrency, threatening to leak the stolen data on cybercrime forums should his demands not be met.”