A 35-year-old Armenian national was sentenced to two years in prison for his involvement in a series of Ryuk ransomware attacks while living in Ukraine and Russia in 2019 and 2020, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Karen Vardanyan was extradited from Ukraine to the United States last year and pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud and extortion in July. Vardanyan’s sentencing, which also calls for about $1.2 million in restitution to victims, matches terms of a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors.

Vardanyan and his co-conspirators’ victims include a Michigan-based company that paid a ransom of nearly $1.2 million in January 2020, a Watsonville, Oregon-based technology company that was attacked in December 2019 and a Texas-based school breached in February 2020, according to court records.

“Like Vardanyan, many cybercriminals are not masterminds of a complex ransomware or extortion scheme but nonetheless play an integral part in the success of these crimes,” read a memo signed by U.S. attorneys in the District of Oregon.

“Unfortunately, high rewards and a relatively low risk of detection are basic features of cybercrime. The only way to affect the cost-benefit analysis of these crimes is to impose meaningful sentences on those who are caught,” the U.S. attorneys added.

Prosecutors previously accused Vardanyan and his co-conspirators — Ukrainian nationals Oleg Nikolayevich Lyulyava and Andrii Leonydovich Prykhodchenko, and Armenian national Levon Georgiyovych Avetisyan — of illegally accessing computer networks to deploy Ryuk ransomware on hundreds of compromised servers and workstations between March 2019 and September 2020.

Ryuk ransomware was prevalent in 2019 and 2020, infecting thousands of victims globally across the private sector, state and local municipalities, local school districts and critical infrastructure, including a wave of attacks on U.S. hospitals.

Victims of Ryuk ransomware attacks include Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, Universal Health Services, Electronic Warfare Associates, a North Carolina water utility and multiple U.S. news outlets.

Justice Department officials said Vardanyan and his co-conspirators received about 1,160 bitcoins — valued at more than $15 million at the time — in ransom payments from victim companies.

Prosecutors said they found no evidence Vardanyan was still engaged in criminal activity at the time of his arrest. Vardanyan’s incarceration will be followed by three years of supervised release, and his conviction will have immigration consequences resulting in removal from the United States after serving his sentence.

The post Ryuk ransomware operator sentenced to 2 years in prison appeared first on CyberScoop.

OpenAI and the Ukrainian government have agreed to a partnership that will provide AI tools and subsidized computing resources to better protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.

The agreement, announced Wednesday at OpenAI’s New York office, will provide Ukrainian cybersecurity officials with access to advanced AI models designed for cybersecurity work through the company’s Daybreak program. OpenAI said it is also pledging over $1 billion in subsidized tokens to support the initiative.

During a panel discussion Dmytro Kushneruk, consul general of Ukraine in San Francisco, outlined how the tools would be used for cybersecurity automation, including functions such as incident response, threat triaging, login analysis, inventorying systems, code analysis and validating vulnerabilities.

In nearly all cases, Kushneruk said the primary benefit was carrying out those functions at machine speed. But this speed is meant to complement, not replace, Ukrainians’ human expertise.

In regard to incident response Kushneruk said humans must view “thousands and thousands of these logs and they have to find what’s really important, that’s why AI can give capable defenders really much greater advantage and leverage.” 

“This is why the object is not to replace the cyber defender with AI, but to make sure the cyber defender acts faster,” he added.

Kushneruk said that for Ukraine, the partnership “is really not about protecting computers, it is about actually keeping our country running.”

Ukraine faces approximately 6,000 cyberattacks per year, or about 15 per day, according to Kushneruk. Over the past twelve years, the country’s critical infrastructure, including electricity and water systems, has endured sustained attacks from Russia in the form of cyberattacks and physical strikes.

Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s critical infrastructure has been under constant threat. While missiles remain the primary concern, Kushneruk said Ukraine has been preparing to protect vital services since Russian GRU hackers shut down the country’s power grid in 2015. 

He added that while the country was “maybe not so much prepared” to deal with the fallout in 2015, it improved over time, including the resilience displayed in 2025 when trains kept running after Russian hackers attacked Ukraine’s railway system.

Some national security experts and congressional committees have explicitly cited the resilience of Ukrainian critical infrastructure as a model for U.S. industry.

Naz Durakoğlu, minority staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said there is “pretty much across the board” agreement between the parties in favor of similar adoption of defensive AI tools by U.S. critical infrastructure operators, though issues like regulation remain sticking points.

“This is something that’s already happening, and frankly, it’s just kind of a basic duty of government to make sure that when you turn the tap on, water comes out, the electricity doesn’t go out, and hospitals keep running and treating patients,” said Durakoğlu. “So there is a broad understanding that this is a major issue, and I will say seeing what Ukraine has to go through day-to-day is also a huge wake-up call to our members on a bipartisan basis.”

OpenAI has publicly pushed for its product, and AI at-large, to be used to solve these types of problems. Company president and co-founder Greg Brockman signed an open letter released earlier this year calling for “collective action” and widespread use of AI models to find and fix vulnerabilities before the rest of the world,  including foreign governments and cybercriminals, got access to the same capabilities.

According to Politico, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with U.S. power companies in July to discuss using AI to protect the nation’s electrical grids.

On Wednesday, OpenAI’s national security policy head, Sasha Baker, said the company felt “urgency” to try to strike similar agreements with other governments and industries.

“There’s this period of time where we’re really rushing to get [these tools] in the hands of critical infrastructure operators, of governments around the world, of people who want to patch systems, defend their networks, remediate vulnerabilities because we know as these tools proliferate out there in the ecosystems, there are going to be bad guys out there that also try to use them,” said Baker. “So, we have this window of time to take action and we’re really motivated by the idea that we need to act with some urgency.”

The post OpenAI, Ukraine partner on ‘Daybreak’ program to protect power grids and water systems  appeared first on CyberScoop.

A Russian state-sponsored threat group has been stealing sensitive data from governments and commercial organizations since July 2025 via a novel exploit in popular Linux-based enterprise software, U.S. authorities and cyber officials from more than a dozen other countries warned in a joint cybersecurity advisory Thursday.

Laundry Bear’s most recent espionage campaign involves the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite that wasn’t patched until November 2025, five months after attacks were well underway, officials said. 

The exploit just requires a view — no clicks — and allows attackers to steal the previous 90 days’ worth of email, the account’s password, search history, the victim organization’s email directory, two-factor authentication tokens and other newly created passwords.

“The covert and persistent nature of this activity, along with the absence of any known financial extortion, almost certainly indicates this group’s involvement in espionage activities with Russian government backing,” officials wrote in the advisory. 

“Additionally, extensive Ukrainian targeting, prior to use against U.S. and other NATO allies, outlines an increasing trend within Russian cyber threat groups to target Ukrainian users first—both as a priority target and as a testbench for malicious cyber techniques before broader global deployment.”

The state-sponsored espionage group, also known as Void Blizzard, has compromised governments and organizations in the defense, education, energy, law enforcement, media, finance, transportation and technology sectors. 

Laundry Bear’s year-long campaign involving the exploitation of CVE-2025-66376 showcases more technical capabilities, including a custom JavaScript payload it delivers to targeted victims via phishing emails. The threat group could also likely adapt the novel data exfiltration and aggregation capability, dubbed “beehive,” to exploit other vulnerabilities, officials warned.

The defect’s medium-severity rating of 6.1 underscores the challenge defenders regularly confront in prioritizing patching schedules based on measure of severity alone.

The Russian state-supported group, which has been active since at least 2024, is still actively exploiting Zimbra Collaboration Suite instances that remain unpatched, officials said.

Authorities shared Thursday indicators of compromise, mitigation steps and urged organizations to update their vulnerable software.

“This campaign’s targeted victimology and limited exploitation capabilities likely indicate this group manually identifies and targets the victim organizations” by identifying organizations with public-facing infrastructure, officials wrote in the advisory.

Once a target is identified, Laundry Bear also likely compiles email addresses for users to target with the exploit via phishing emails. Officials did not identify specific victims or describe the volume of organizations already compromised.

The joint cybersecurity advisory was issued by the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

The post Russian espionage group using novel Zimbra exploit to steal sensitive data from Western countries appeared first on CyberScoop.

The Treasury Department is slapping sanctions on First VPN and its administrator for allegedly selling services to ransomware operators, as well as another person aiding ransomware gangs.

First VPN Services, or 1VPNS, was “deeply embedded in the cybercriminal ecosystem” and appeared in virtually every Europol investigation in recent years, the law enforcement body said after a sting targeting the service in May.

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned 1VPNS as well as its alleged administrator, Ukrainian citizen Dmytro Rashevskyi, Monday in conjunction with the United Kingdom. The outfit provided anonymity services that could be legitimate in some instances, but 1VPNS advertised itself in online cybercrime forums for more than a decade, touting its refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, the office said.

“Numerous ransomware groups have purchased infrastructure from 1VPNS, which they have leveraged in attacks on U.S. companies and institutions — including to hide the origins of their attacks, deploy malware, and manage exfiltrated data,” OFAC said. “Victims of ransomware attacks that involved the use of 1VPNS infrastructure have included U.S. businesses, financial services companies, hospitals, and municipal governments.”

Treasury also sanctioned Belarus national Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev for allegedly selling “cryptors,” tools used to disguise ransomware and other malware, to ransomware operators.

“Unlike legitimate encryption tools, which are designed to protect data and the privacy of the people that own it, cryptors are built specifically to make malware stealthier and more effective by disguising it as harmless files,” OFAC said.

Treasury’s sanctions designations dovetail with separate, unrelated cyber sanctions that European governments from Monday. The FBI has previously issued an alert about First VPN Service. 

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs said it has seen 1VPNS selling its services to ransomware operators for prices ranging from $723 for Anubis to $58 Sinobi.

“The amounts are small because infrastructure subscriptions are small,” Ari Redbord, global head of policy and government affairs for the company, wrote on LinkedIn. “A named ransomware group paying a named enabler on public chains still leaves a trail investigators can follow after the fact.”

Victims tied to First VPN Service infrastructure include U.S. municipalities, hospitals and financial services companies.

Europol said it had arrested the administrator of 1VPNS in its May sting, but did not name them. 

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a question about whether its sanctions targeted that same arrested person.

The post Treasury sanctions First VPN Service, others for abetting ransomware gangs appeared first on CyberScoop.

An Armenian national who was extradited from Ukraine to the United States last year pleaded guilty to participating in a series of attacks in 2019 and 2020 involving Ryuk ransomware, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Karen Serobovich Vardanyan pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud and extortion. He agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million million in restitution and faces up to 15 years in jail.

The 34-year-old admitted to participating in cybercrime from November 2019 to April 2020 when he and his co-conspirators deployed Ryuk ransomware against three U.S.-based organizations while living in Ukraine and Russia.

Vardanyan’s victims include a Michigan-based company that paid a ransom of nearly $1.2 million in January 2020, a Watsonville, Oregon-based technology company that was attacked in December 2019 and a Texas-based school breached in February 2020.

Prosecutors previously accused Vardanyan and his co-conspirators — Ukrainian nationals Oleg Nikolayevich Lyulyava and Andrii Leonydovich Prykhodchenko, and Armenian national Levon Georgiyovych Avetisyan — of illegally accessing computer networks to deploy Ryuk ransomware on hundreds of compromised servers and workstations between March 2019 and September 2020.

Ryuk ransomware was prevalent in 2019 and 2020, infecting thousands of victims globally across the private sector, state and local municipalities, local school districts and critical infrastructure, including a wave of attacks on U.S. hospitals.

Victims of Ryuk ransomware attacks include Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, Universal Health Services, Electronic Warfare Associates, a North Carolina water utility and multiple U.S. newspapers.

Ryuk ransomware operators extorted victim companies by demanding ransom payments in Bitcoin in exchange for decryption keys. Justice Department officials said Vardanyan and his co-conspirators received about 1,160 bitcoins — valued at more than $15 million at the time — in ransom payments from victim companies.

Vardanyan, as part of his guilty plea, also acknowledged that his conviction will have immigration consequences resulting in removal from the United States after serving his sentence. 

The U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon has yet to schedule his sentencing.

The post Armenian national pleads guilty to Ryuk ransomware attacks appeared first on CyberScoop.