Monster Cloud Owner Accused of Billing Over $19M While Secretly Paying Ransoms to Decrypt Data
Summary: The U.S. Department of Justice charged Zohar Pinhasi, a 50-year-old U.S. and Israeli national who owned and operated the Florida company MonsterCloud, with two counts of wire fraud and one count of wire fraud conspiracy for allegedly claiming to decrypt ransomware victims' data with proprietary tools while secretly paying attackers for decryptors. Pinhasi is accused of charging clients more than $19 million and paying more than $8 million in ransom payments, including an August 2023 payment of about $8,200 billed to a client at roughly $150,000 and an October 2021 payment of about $236,000 billed at about $380,000; each count carries up to 20 years in prison.
What's compelling: A recovery vendor that markets itself on refusing to pay ransoms is alleged to have paid attackers behind its clients' backs and billed more than $19 million for it - so the question for a security leader is how much of your incident response chain you can actually verify, not just contract.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
- Topics
- Ransomware
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