An elusive hacker who went by the handle “UNKN” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.

Shchukin was named as UNKN (a.k.a. UNKNOWN) in an advisory published by the German Federal Criminal Police (the “Bundeskriminalamt” or BKA for short). The BKA said Shchukin and another Russian — 43-year-old Anatoly Sergeevitsch Kravchuk — extorted nearly $2 million euros across two dozen cyberattacks that caused more than 35 million euros in total economic damage.

Germany’s BKA said Shchukin acted as the head of one of the largest worldwide operating ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil, which pioneered the practice of double extortion — charging victims once for a key needed to unlock hacked systems, and a separate payment in exchange for a promise not to publish stolen data.

Shchukin’s name appeared in a Feb. 2023 filing (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department seeking the seizure of various cryptocurrency accounts associated with proceeds from the REvil ransomware gang’s activities. The government said the digital wallet tied to Shchukin contained more than $317,000 in ill-gotten cryptocurrency.

The GandCrab ransomware affiliate program first surfaced in January 2018, and paid enterprising hackers huge shares of the profits just for hacking into user accounts at major corporations. The GandCrab team would then try to expand that access, often siphoning vast amounts of sensitive and internal documents in the process. The malware’s curators shipped five major revisions to the GandCrab code, each corresponding with sneaky new features and bug fixes aimed at thwarting the efforts of computer security firms to stymie the spread of the malware.

On May 31, 2019, the GandCrab team announced the group was shutting down after extorting more than $2 billion from victims. “We are a living proof that you can do evil and get off scot-free,” GandCrab’s farewell address famously quipped. “We have proved that one can make a lifetime of money in one year. We have proved that you can become number one by general admission, not in your own conceit.”

The REvil ransomware affiliate program materialized around the same as GandCrab’s demise, fronted by a user named UNKNOWN who announced on a Russian cybercrime forum that he’d deposited $1 million in the forum’s escrow to show he meant business. By this time, many cybersecurity experts had concluded REvil was little more than a reorganization of GandCrab.

UNKNOWN also gave an interview to Dmitry Smilyanets, a former malicious hacker hired by Recorded Future, wherein UNKNOWN described a rags-to-riches tale unencumbered by ethics and morals.

“As a child, I scrounged through the trash heaps and smoked cigarette butts,” UNKNOWN told Recorded Future. “I walked 10 km one way to the school. I wore the same clothes for six months. In my youth, in a communal apartment, I didn’t eat for two or even three days. Now I am a millionaire.”

As described in The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, UNKNOWN and REvil reinvested significant earnings into improving their success and mirroring practices of legitimate businesses. The authors wrote:

“Just as a real-world manufacturer might hire other companies to handle logistics or web design, ransomware developers increasingly outsourced tasks beyond their purview, focusing instead on improving the quality of their ransomware. The higher quality ransomware—which, in many cases, the Hunting Team could not break—resulted in more and higher pay-outs from victims. The monumental payments enabled gangs to reinvest in their enterprises. They hired more specialists, and their success accelerated.”

“Criminals raced to join the booming ransomware economy. Underworld ancillary service providers sprouted or pivoted from other criminal work to meet developers’ demand for customized support. Partnering with gangs like GandCrab, ‘cryptor’ providers ensured ransomware could not be detected by standard anti-malware scanners. ‘Initial access brokerages’ specialized in stealing credentials and finding vulnerabilities in target networks, selling that access to ransomware operators and affiliates. Bitcoin “tumblers” offered discounts to gangs that used them as a preferred vendor for laundering ransom payments. Some contractors were open to working with any gang, while others entered exclusive partnerships.”

REvil would evolve into a feared “big-game-hunting” machine capable of extracting hefty extortion payments from victims, largely going after organizations with more than $100 million in annual revenues and fat new cyber insurance policies that were known to pay out.

Over the July 4, 2021 weekend in the United States, REvil hacked into and extorted Kaseya, a company that handled IT operations for more than 1,500 businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. The FBI would later announce they’d infiltrated the ransomware group’s servers prior to the Kaseya hack but couldn’t tip their hand at the time. REvil never recovered from that core compromise, or from the FBI’s release of a free decryption key for REvil victims who couldn’t or didn’t pay.

Shchukin is from Krasnodar, Russia and is thought to reside there, the BKA said.

“Based on the investigations so far, it is assumed that the wanted person is abroad, presumably in Russia,” the BKA advised. “Travel behaviour cannot be ruled out.”

There is little that connects Shchukin to UNKNOWN’s various accounts on the Russian crime forums. But a review of the Russian crime forums indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows there is plenty connecting Shchukin to a hacker identity called “Ger0in” who operated large botnets and sold “installs” — allowing other cybercriminals to rapidly deploy malware of their choice to thousands of PCs in one go. However, Ger0in was only active between 2010 and 2011, well before UNKNOWN’s appearance as the REvil front man.

A review of the mugshots released by the BKA at the image comparison site Pimeyes found a match on this birthday celebration from 2023, which features a young man named Daniel wearing the same fancy watch as in the BKA photos.

Update, April 6, 12:06 p.m. ET: A reader forwarded this English-dubbed audio recording from a ccc.de (37C3) conference talk in Germany from 2023 that previously outed Shchukin as the REvil leader (Shchuckin is mentioned at around 24:25).

Law enforcement agencies from multiple European countries are still pursuing leads on people involved in the Black Basta ransomware group, nearly a year after the group’s internal chat logs were leaked, exposing key details about its operations, and at least six months since the group claimed responsibility for new attacks.

Officials in Ukraine and Germany said they raided the homes of two Russian nationals accused of participating in Black Basta’s crimes and effectively halted their operations. The pair of alleged criminals who were living in Ukraine were not named.

German police publicly identified a third Russian national — Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov — as Black Basta’s alleged leader. Nefedov, a 35-year-old who was subsequently added to the most-wanted lists of Europol and Interpol, allegedly formed and ran Black Basta since 2022, authorities said. 

He is accused of extorting more than 100 companies in Germany and about 600 other countries globally. Nefedov’s current whereabouts are unknown, but he is believed to be living in Russia.

Authorities said Nefedov may have previously been involved with the Conti ransomware group, which disbanded in 2022 after its internal messages were also leaked. Members of the Russian-language ransomware collective rebranded under three subgroups: Zeon, Black Basta and Quantum, which quickly rebranded to Royal before rebranding again to BlackSuit in 2024. 

Police said they seized data and cryptocurrency assets during their searches of the alleged Black Basta participants’ residences in Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv, Ukraine, but they did not provide further detail about what the evidence revealed.

The pair of alleged Black Basta co-conspirators are accused of specializing in stealing credentials, which were used to break into targeted companies’ networks, steal confidential data and launch malware to encrypt data for extortion attempts.

International law enforcement agencies’ ongoing efforts to target Black Basta and its alleged participants underscores a sustained effort to track cybercriminals despite the group’s relative dormancy. 

Black Basta’s data leak site was shut down shortly after its internal chats were leaked last year, but uncaptured cybercriminals typically scatter and join new groups in the wake of a takedown or disbandment, said Allan Liska, threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future.

“Even if Black Basta hasn’t been active, it doesn’t mean that the people behind it haven’t been,” he said.

Ransomware experts said Nefedov’s ringleader position at Black Basta and his previous involvement with Conti was already known in law enforcement and threat intelligence circles.

“The accusation signals less about the impact of Black Basta and more about the significance of Nefedov,” said Ian Gray, vice president of cyber threat intelligence operations at Flashpoint. 

The formal naming and request for information on Nefedov aligns with a broader law enforcement strategy to target core leadership responsible for orchestrating cyberattacks, Gray added.

Ransomware response is a never-ending pursuit that consistentely attracts new players and new groups at a faster clip than law enforcement can manage. 

“You cut one head off and two appear,” Liska said. “You still have to cut the head off, you still have to stop the activity.”

While ransomware activity remains elevated, law enforcement is sticking to multidimensional countermeasures by targeting operators and affiliates, initial access brokers, infostealers, infrastructure providers and key services criminals use to deploy or facilitate the ransomware ecosystem.

These takedowns, seizures, indictments and arrests are sometimes organized under ongoing international sting operations such as Operation Endgame, which has neutralized malware networks, remote access trojans, botnets and other cybercrime enablers. 

“These operations can’t be one-and-done,” Liska said. “They have to be interconnected and use that intelligence to build more cases against other actors.”

The post Black Basta’s alleged ringleader identified as authorities raid homes of other members appeared first on CyberScoop.

Leaked training videos suggest that Intellexa retained the ability to remotely access the systems of customers who had used its Predator spyware, raising questions about human rights safeguards, according to an investigation published Thursday.

That was just one finding from a series of separate but overlapping probes released over the past 24 hours. The training video revelations came via a joint investigation by Inside Story, Haaretz and WAV Research Collective in partnership with Amnesty International. Google and Recorded Future also published research Thursday about Intellexa.

“The fact that, at least in some cases, Intellexa appears to have retained the capability to remotely access Predator customer logs – allowing company staff to see details of surveillance operations and targeted individuals [—] raises questions about its own human rights due diligence processes,” Jurre van Bergen, technologist at Amnesty International Security Lab, said in a news release.

“If a mercenary spyware company is found to be directly involved in the operation of its product, then by human rights standards, it could potentially leave them open to claims of liability in cases of misuse and if any human rights abuses are caused by the use of spyware,” he continued.

The “Intellexa Leaks” investigation learned more about the U.S.-sanctioned company’s operations as well. One revelation was that Intellexa was exploiting malicious mobile advertisements to infect targets, a vector named “Aladdin,” investigators concluded.

Other findings include confirmation of Predator domains imitating legitimate Kazakhstani news sites, and additional evidence linking Predator spyware to surveillance of prominent Egyptian political activist Ayman Nour and Greek investigative journalist Thanasis Koukakis, according to Amnesty. And the news publications reported on the first reported Predator infection in Pakistan, of a human rights lawyer, and additional targeting in the country.

A lawyer for Intellexa founder Tal Dilian only responded in part to questions from Haaretz, the publication reported, saying that ‘progressive groups rely on biased and politically motivated international organizations that spread unfounded claims, and use journalists, as ‘useful idiots,’ who repeatedly publish so-called investigative reports directed by the same actors.”

The attorney added: “I have not committed any crime nor operated any cyber system in Greece or anywhere else. Any claim suggesting otherwise is false and defamatory. I categorically reject any attempt to link me to events in Greece or to the media campaign surrounding them. I protect my rights and will continue pursuing legal action against those who defame me.”

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, meanwhile, published a study on individuals and groups connected to Intellexa.

“These connections span technical, operational, and corporate roles, including backend development, infrastructure setup, and company formation,” wrote Julian-Ferdinand Vögele, principle threat researcher. “In addition, Recorded Future’s proprietary intelligence revealed ongoing Predator spyware activity in multiple countries, including new evidence of its deployment in Iraq.”

On Wednesday, Google said it had identified the companies Intellexa had created to infiltrate the advertising ecosystems, with partners subsequently shutting down the accounts.

Additionally, the firm pointed to one way Intellexa stands out among others.

“Over the past several years, Intellexa has solidified its position as one of, if not the most, prolific spyware vendors exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities against mobile browsers,” a blog post from Google Threat Intelligence Group reads. “Despite the consistent efforts of security researchers and platform vendors to identify and patch these flaws, Intellexa repeatedly demonstrates an ability to procure or develop new zero-day exploits, quickly adapting and continuing operations for their customers.”

The post Intellexa remotely accessed Predator spyware customer systems, investigation finds appeared first on CyberScoop.

In May 2025, the European Union levied financial sanctions on the owners of Stark Industries Solutions Ltd., a bulletproof hosting provider that materialized two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and quickly became a top source of Kremlin-linked cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But new findings show those sanctions have done little to stop Stark from simply rebranding and transferring their assets to other corporate entities controlled by its original hosting providers.

Materializing just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Stark Industries Solutions became a frequent source of massive DDoS attacks, Russian-language proxy and VPN services, malware tied to Russia-backed hacking groups, and fake news. ISPs like Stark are called “bulletproof” providers when they cultivate a reputation for ignoring any abuse complaints or police inquiries about activity on their networks.

In May 2025, the European Union sanctioned one of Stark’s two main conduits to the larger Internet — Moldova-based PQ Hosting — as well as the company’s Moldovan owners Yuri and Ivan Neculiti. The EU Commission said the Neculiti brothers and PQ Hosting were linked to Russia’s hybrid warfare efforts.

But a new report from Recorded Future finds that just prior to the sanctions being announced, Stark rebranded to the[.]hosting, under control of the Dutch entity WorkTitans BV (AS209847) on June 24, 2025. The Neculiti brothers reportedly got a heads up roughly 12 days before the sanctions were announced, when Moldovan and EU media reported on the forthcoming inclusion of the Neculiti brothers in the sanctions package.

In response, the Neculiti brothers moved much of Stark’s considerable address space and other resources over to a new company in Moldova called PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L., an entity reportedly connected to the Neculiti brothers thanks to the re-use of a phone number from the original PQ Hosting.

“Although the majority of associated infrastructure remains attributable to Stark Industries, these changes likely reflect an attempt to obfuscate ownership and sustain hosting services under new legal and network entities,” Recorded Future observed.

Neither the Recorded Future report nor the May 2025 sanctions from the EU mentioned a second critical pillar of Stark’s network that KrebsOnSecurity identified in a May 2024 profile on the notorious bulletproof hoster: The Netherlands-based hosting provider MIRhosting.

MIRhosting is operated by 38-year old Andrey Nesterenko, whose personal website says he is an accomplished concert pianist who began performing publicly at a young age. DomainTools says mirhosting[.]com is registered to Mr. Nesterenko and to Innovation IT Solutions Corp, which lists addresses in London and in Nesterenko’s stated hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

According to the book Inside Cyber Warfare by Jeffrey Carr, Innovation IT Solutions Corp. was responsible for hosting StopGeorgia[.]ru, a hacktivist website for organizing cyberattacks against Georgia that appeared at the same time Russian forces invaded the former Soviet nation in 2008. That conflict was thought to be the first war ever fought in which a notable cyberattack and an actual military engagement happened simultaneously.

Mr. Nesterenko did not respond to requests for comment. In May 2024, Mr. Nesterenko said he couldn’t verify whether StopGeorgia was ever a customer because they didn’t keep records going back that far. But he maintained that Stark Industries Solutions was merely one client of many, and claimed MIRhosting had not received any actionable complaints about abuse on Stark.

However, it appears that MIRhosting is once again the new home of Stark Industries, and that MIRhosting employees are managing both the[.]hosting and WorkTitans — the primary beneficiaries of Stark’s assets.

A copy of the incorporation documents for WorkTitans BV obtained from the Dutch Chamber of Commerce shows WorkTitans also does business under the names Misfits Media and and WT Hosting (considering Stark’s historical connection to Russian disinformation websites, “Misfits Media” is a bit on the nose).

The incorporation document says the company was formed in 2019 by a y.zinad@worktitans.nl. That email address corresponds to a LinkedIn account for a Youssef Zinad, who says their personal websites are worktitans[.]nl and custom-solution[.]nl. The profile also links to a website (etripleasims dot nl) that LinkedIn currently blocks as malicious. All of these websites are or were hosted at MIRhosting.

Although Mr. Zinad’s LinkedIn profile does not mention any employment at MIRhosting, virtually all of his LinkedIn posts over the past year have been reposts of advertisements for MIRhosting’s services.

A Google search for Youssef Zinad reveals multiple startup-tracking websites that list him as the founder of the[.]hosting, which censys.io finds is hosted by PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L.

The Dutch Chamber of Commerce document says WorkTitans’ sole shareholder is a company in Almere, Netherlands called Fezzy B.V. Who runs Fezzy? The phone number listed in a Google search for Fezzy B.V. — 31651079755 — also was used to register a Facebook profile for a Youssef Zinad from the same town, according to the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence.

In a series of email exchanges leading up to KrebsOnSecurity’s May 2024 deep dive on Stark, Mr. Nesterenko included Mr. Zinad in the message thread (youssef@mirhosting.com), referring to him as part of the company’s legal team. The Dutch website stagemarkt[.]nl lists Youssef Zinad as an official contact for MIRhosting’s offices in Almere. Mr. Zinad did not respond to requests for comment.

Given the above, it is difficult to argue with the Recorded Future report on Stark’s rebranding, which concluded that “the EU’s sanctioning of Stark Industries was largely ineffective, as affiliated infrastructure remained operational and services were rapidly re-established under new branding, with no significant or lasting disruption.”