A longtime former member of Conti, a ransomware group that attacked more than 1,000 organizations globally before it disbanded in 2022, pleaded guilty to participating in some of those attacks in federal court Wednesday, the Justice Department said.

Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, also known as Alexsey Alexseevich Litvinenko, admitted he joined the prolific cybercrime group in September 2021 and held data on 12 victims, including eight based in the United States. The 44-year-old told the court he developed malware that Conti used in some of its attacks, according to officials. 

“The defendant and his conspirators used the Conti ransomware to terrorize people and businesses in the United States and around the world, causing millions of dollars in damage,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

Lytvynenko and his co-conspirators used the ransomware to attack more than 1,000 victims globally, ensnaring victims in 47 states, Washington, Puerto Rico and about 31 countries, according to the Justice Department. The FBI estimates Conti extorted more than $150 million in ransom payments from victims.

The Ukrainian national pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison upon sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 10. 

Lytvynenko was arrested in Ireland in July 2023, extradited to the United States in October 2025, and remains in federal custody in Tennessee where at least three of his victims are based. He left Ukraine in 2022 and obtained temporary protective status in Ireland, residing in Cork at the time of his arrest. 

Prosecutors said Lytvynenko and his co-conspirators extorted about $634,000 in Bitcoin from two victims in Tennessee, including an undisclosed government entity that resulted in the compromise of a sheriff’s department, local emergency medical services and a local police department. According to an indictment that was unsealed last fall, Lytvynenko and his co-conspirators also leaked data they stole from another Tennessee-based victim after it refused to pay a $3 million ransom demand.

Four of Lytvynenko’s alleged co-conspirators — Maksim Galochkin, Maksim Rudenskiy, Mikhail Mikhailovich Tsarev and Andrey Yuryevich Zhuykov — were indicted in 2023 in the same federal court for crimes related to their suspected involvement in Conti attacks from 2020 to 2022. 

Authorities said Lytvynenko engaged in cybercrime after Conti disbanded and its members splintered off into new groups, adding that he “was asleep but within arms’ reach of an open laptop running Cobalt Strike” at the time of his arrest.

At one point, Conti was among the most prolific ransomware groups globally, impacting hundreds of critical infrastructure providers, Costa Rica’s government in 2022, and ultimately leading the State Department to offer a $10 million reward for information related to Conti’s leaders. The group was notoriously resilient, bouncing back with new infrastructure and hitting new targets after a massive leak exposed chats between the group’s members in 2022.

Conti disbanded later that year, but members of the Cyrillic-language group rebranded under three subgroups: Zeon, Black Basta and Quantum, which quickly rebranded to Royal, before rebranding again to BlackSuit in 2024.

“Lytvynenko’s guilty plea is a significant step toward holding cyber criminals accountable for the damage they inflict on victims worldwide,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said in a statement “Lytvynenko profited from fear and coercion, conspiring to use Conti ransomware to extort victims and steal their data.”

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A Tennessee man accused of abusing and sexually exploiting children while actively participating in 764, a sprawling online nihilistic violent extremist collective affiliated with The Com, pleaded not guilty Thursday to a series of charges that could keep him locked up for 50 years.

Zachary Sweeney has allegedly victimized multiple children, on numerous occasions grooming and coercing minors to produce child sexual abuse material that he distributed and sometimes sold, the Justice Department said. One of the 30-year-old’s alleged victims later died of an overdose.

Sweeney has been the subject of multiple FBI investigations, which uncovered extensive crimes against children dating back to at least 2022, prosecutors said. His alleged involvement in 764 and, by extension, The Com, underscores the growing, multi-faceted threat of physical violence, cybercrime, extortion and the pursuit of criminal underground notoriety posed by thousands of members typically between 11 and 25 years old.

Victims of these crimes are often young, vulnerable and degraded or traumatized for years with life-altering impact.

“Violent extremists who victimize vulnerable children online are among the worst predators in our community and across the country,” Braden Boucek, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said in a statement.

Members of 764 and related groups commit crimes in the United States and engage with other extremists globally to foment social unrest and destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable people, the Justice Department said.

Police arrested Sweeney Thursday and charged him with three counts of sexual exploitation and attempted sexual exploitation of a minor and three counts of receiving visual depictions of CSAM. Prosecutors said they intend to request Sweeney remain detained at his next court appearance June 3. 

Sweeney allegedly traveled to New York, Indiana, Missouri and Georgia to meet numerous victims in person. Officials received reports from some of his alleged victims and online platforms, triggering FBI interviews with some of his alleged victims as early as 2023. 

One of his alleged victims, who began interacting with Sweeney when she was a teenager, told investigators she degraded herself and participated in virtual self-harm group video calls with a group of people she described as friends of his in The Com. Sweeney alleged raped her and streamed the crime online. 

She died of an overdose in 2024, approximately ten days after FBI agents interviewed her. 

Sweeney allegedly drugged and raped other victims and shared videos of those acts online, according to court records.

The FBI searched Sweeney’s residence in St. Louis in September 2023, more than two months after Meta sent a pair of tips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that linked him to Instagram chats containing CSAM.

Agents seized devices containing evidence of 99 possible CSAM images and videos, but encryption and passwords prevented authorities from conducting further examination, according to court records.

Sweeney moved to Tennessee in the summer of 2024 and allegedly continued to travel out of state to meet victims in person and coerce other victims to produce CSAM through at least the summer of 2025.

Authorities accuse Sweeney of boasting about his crimes and sharing blackmail material, sexual assault and CSAM depicting underage female victims.

Authorities have arrested multiple members of 764 during the past year, reflecting heightened law enforcement activity targeting the violent extremist collective and other offshoots affiliated with The Com.

Two alleged leaders of 764, Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, were arrested and charged for directing and distributing CSAM in April. Alexis Aldair Chavez, of San Antonio, pleaded guilty in December to multiple crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children while acting as an administrator and leader of 8884, a splinter group of 764.

“This operation puts every child predator on notice: the FBI will hunt you down and bring you to justice,” Terence Reilly, special agent in charge of the FBI Nashville Field Office, said in a statement. “Removing violent extremists from our streets protects our most innocent and vulnerable members of society.”

You can read the indictment below.

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A federal judge sentenced a Latvian national to 102 months in prison for his involvement in a series of ransomware attacks for more than two years prior to his arrest in 2023, the Justice Department said Monday.

Deniss Zolotarjovs, a resident of Moscow at the time, helped an organization led by former leaders of the Conti ransomware group extort payments from more than 54 companies. 

The 35-year-old was mostly tasked with putting pressure on the crew’s victims. In one case, Zolotarjovs urged co-conspirators to leak or sell children’s health records stolen from a pediatric healthcare company and ultimately sent a collection of sensitive data to “hundreds of patients,” according to court records. 

The ransomware crew identified itself in ransom notes under multiple names during Zolotarjovs’ involvement, including Conti, Karakurt, Royal, TommyLeaks, SchoolBoys Ransomware, Akira and others. 

Zolotarjov and his co-conspirators extorted nearly $16 million in confirmed ransom payments from their victims. Officials estimate the group’s crimes resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, not including the psychological and future financial exposure confronting tens of thousands of people whose personal data was stolen.

“Deniss Zolotarjovs helped his ransomware gang profit from hacks of dozens of companies, and even on a government entity whose 911 system was forced offline,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. 

Officials said Zolotarjovs searched for points of leverage after researching victim companies and analyzing stolen data. Many of the victims impacted during his active participation between June 2021 and August 2023 were based in the United States.

Zolotarjov was arrested in the country of Georgia in December 2023 and extradited to the United States in August 2024. He pleaded guilty to money laundering and wire fraud in July 2025. 

“Cybercriminals might think they are invulnerable by hiding behind anonymizing tools and complex cryptocurrency patterns while they attack American victims from non-extradition countries,” Dominick S. Gerace II, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said in a statement. “But Zolotarjovs’s prosecution shows that federal law enforcement also has a global reach, and we will hold accountable bad actors like Zolotarjovs, who will now spend significant time in prison.”

The Russian ransomware crew was prolific and spread across multiple teams, relying on companies registered in Russia, Europe and the United States to conceal its operations. Authorities said the group included former Russian law enforcement officers whose connections allowed members to access Russian government databases to harass detractors and identify potential new recruits.

Conti was among the most prolific ransomware groups globally for a time, impacting hundreds of critical infrastructure providers, Costa Rica’s government in 2022, and ultimately leading the State Department to offer a $10 million reward for information related to Conti’s leaders. The group was notoriously resilient, bouncing back with new infrastructure and hitting new targets after a massive leak exposed chats between the group’s members in 2022.

Conti disbanded later that year, but members of the Cyrillic-language group rebranded under three subgroups: Zeon, Black Basta and Quantum, which quickly rebranded to Royal, before rebranding again to BlackSuit in 2024.

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A core leader of the hacker subset of The Com responsible for a series of high-profile phishing attacks and cryptocurrency thefts from September 2021 to April 2023 pleaded guilty to federal charges, the Justice Department said Friday. 

Tyler Robert Buchanan of Dundee, Scotland, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The 24-year-old was arrested by Spanish police in Palma in 2024 as he attempted to board a charter flight to Naples, Italy. 

Buchanan has been in federal custody since April 2025 and faces up to 22 years in federal prison at his sentencing, which is scheduled for August 21. 

The British national and his co-conspirators, including Noah Michael Urban, who was sentenced to a 10-year federal prison sentence last year, harvested thousands of credentials via phishing and stole more than $8 million in cryptocurrency from U.S. residents via SIM-swapping attacks.

Victims included high net worth individuals and businesses in the entertainment, telecom, technology, business process outsourcing, IT, cloud and virtual currency sectors, officials said.

Buchanan and his co-conspirators were part of an aggressive subset of The Com coined Scattered Spider. While The Com and its offshoots don’t operate with formal leaders in the traditional sense, Buchanan played a crucial role in the operation, according to Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B.

“[Buchanan] was the glue that held this gang together. His success at wiping out victims’ savings made him a target for both law enforcement and rival Com gangs,” Nixon told CyberScoop.

“[Buchanan] is part of an older generation that came from certain toxic gaming servers before the pandemic. People from this generation learned hacking in order to steal vanity usernames and bully kids before using it to steal peoples’ savings,” she added.

Federal authorities filed charges against five individuals with links to the Scattered Spider cybercrime outfit in 2024. Buchanan and Urban’s alleged co-conspirators — Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, Evans Onyeaka Osiebo and Joel Martin Evans — still face charges in the case, officials said. 

Nixon lauded law enforcement for acting decisively to arrest Buchanan during a brief window of opportunity while he was traveling internationally. 

“Com members are obsessed with private jets and foreign vacations, and the feds took that dream away with one arrest,” she said. 

The tactic, which U.S. officials also use against Russian cybercriminals, works because most countries are willing to support in the arrest of foreign criminals, thereby keeping them out of their respective jurisdictions, Nixon said. 

“As a foreigner, he was caught in a weaker legal position than if he was arrested at home, and cases following this tactic tend to have very long sentences,” she added. “The takeaway for Com members watching this case is that criminal foreigners associated with violence are the lowest class in every country. And that’s what Com members are when they travel.”

The Justice Department said Buchanan and his co-conspirators defrauded at least a dozen companies and their employees throughout the United States. A digital device police found at his residence in April 2023 contained personal data on numerous individuals and victim companies, according to his plea agreement.

It’s unclear what transpired between that search in April 2023 in Scotland and his June 2024 arrest at a resort city on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Moreover, his plea agreement doesn’t include the entirety of his alleged crimes. 

Buchanan attracted a lot of attention and successfully coordinated many attacks before a rival Com gang allegedly broke into his home and used a blowtorch on him to extract crypto keys in his possession, according to Nixon. 

Following his arrest, Spanish police said Buchanan had gained control of bitcoin worth more than $27 million at that time. 

While early leaders of Scattered Spider have been arrested or sentenced for their crimes, others have filled those roles with even more exceptional impact. 

The Com has grown to thousands of members, typically between 11 and 25 years old, splintered into three primary subsets the FBI describes as Hacker Com, In Real Life Com and Extortion Com.

Criminal acts committed by these multiple, interconnected networks include swatting, extortion and sextortion of minors, production and distribution of child sexual abuse material, violent crime and various other cybercrimes. 

You can read the indictment against Buchanan and some of his co-conspirators below.

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A 41-year-old South Florida man is accused of conducting at least 10 ransomware attacks and helping accomplices extort a combined $75.25 million in ransom payments while he was working as a ransomware negotiator for DigitalMint. 

Five of Angelo John Martino III’s alleged victims hired DigitalMint, which assigned Martino to conduct ransomware negotiations on their clients’ behalf — putting him in a position to play both sides, as the criminal responsible for the attack and the lead negotiator for his alleged victims, according to federal court records unsealed Wednesday.

Martino allegedly obtained an affiliate account on ALPHV, also known as BlackCat, and conspired with other former cybersecurity professionals to break into victims’ networks, steal and encrypt data, and extort companies for ransoms over a six-month period in 2023.

Martino was an unnamed co-conspirator in an indictment filed in November 2025 against Kevin Tyler Martin, another former ransomware negotiator at DigitalMint, and Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former manager of incident response at Sygnia. Goldberg and Martin pleaded guilty in December to participating in a series of ransomware attacks and are scheduled for sentencing April 30.

Prosecutors accuse Martino of providing confidential information regarding ransomware negotiations to ALPHV co-conspirators to maximize the ransom payment. His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The five U.S.-based victims that hired DigitalMint and unwittingly tapped Martino to allegedly conduct ransomware negotiations with himself and his co-conspirators include a nonprofit and companies in the hospitality, financial services, retail and medical industries. All five of those victims paid a ransom.

Goldberg and Martin were not specifically named as co-conspirators in those attacks. Prosecutors previously said they only successfully extorted a financial payment from one of their victims for nearly $1.3 million.

Cybersecurity firm that employed Martino responds

DigitalMint said they suspended Martino’s access to systems when the Justice Department notified the company they were investigating him on April 3 and fired him the next day. The company, which is not accused of any knowledge or involvement with the crimes, added it was not aware that Martino and Martin were already involved in ransomware-related schemes before they were hired. 

“We strongly condemn these former employees’ criminal behavior, which violated our values, ethical standards and the law,” DigitalMint CEO Jonathan Solomon said in a statement to CyberScoop.

“DigitalMint has fully cooperated with law enforcement from the outset and does not expect further charges,” Solomon added. “While no organization can completely eliminate insider risk, we take incidents like this extremely seriously and have strengthened safeguards and internal controls to further reduce the likelihood of similar conduct.”

DigitalMint did not directly answer questions about whether it refunded its clients who were allegedly victimized by Martino. “We are not able to discuss specific client relationships or fee arrangements due to confidentiality obligations,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We remain committed to our clients and have addressed any commercial matters directly with those parties.”

The company also declined to describe the circumstances under which it was hired and assigned Martino to conduct ransomware negotiations on the attacks he allegedly committed. Yet, in a statement it noted: “The charging documents do not allege that Martino referred or brought these victims to DigitalMint.”

The case against Martino showcases an extreme, albeit rare, example of the dark underbelly of ransomware negotiation as a practice. The pitfalls of ransomware negotiation are excessive and these backchannel negotiations, which remain largely unscrutinized, can go awry for various reasons. 

Authorities seize about $12M in assets, set $500K bond

Martino is charged with conspiracy to interfere with commerce by extortion and faces up to 20 years in prison. He is scheduled to enter a plea March 19. 

Authorities seized nearly $9.2 million in five types of cryptocurrency from 21 wallets controlled by Martino. Other items seized from Martino include a 1999 Nissan Skyline, a 2024 Polaris RZR, a 2023 trailer and a 29-foot boat manufactured in 2023.

Officials also seized two properties owned by Martino in Nokomis, Florida, including a bayfront home with an estimated value of $1.68 million and a second single-family home with an estimated value of $396,000. The bayfront home was reported as the second-largest real estate transaction of the week when Martino and his wife purchased the home for $1.791 million in February 2024.

Martino surrendered to the U.S. Marshals in Miami Tuesday and was released on a $500,000 bond. He is restricted from traveling outside the Southern District of Florida and is prohibited from working in the cybersecurity industry.

ALPHV/BlackCat was a notorious ransomware and extortion group linked to a series of attacks on critical infrastructure providers. The ransomware variant first appeared in late 2021, and was later used in dozens of attacks on organizations in the health care sector.

The group behind the ransomware strain also claimed responsibility for the February 2024 attack on UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Change Healthcare, which paid a $22 million ransom and became the largest health care data breach on record, compromising data on about 190 million people.

Two of Martino’s alleged victims paid even higher ransoms in 2023, according to prosecutors, including a nearly $26.8 million payment from the unnamed nonprofit, and a nearly $25.7 million payment from the unnamed financial services company.

You can read the formal charge prosecutors filed against Martino below.

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