Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko admitted to working on the development of a loader for the Conti gang.

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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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Silent Ransom Group, a long-running data extortion operation, continues to hit U.S.-based law firms by impersonating IT support and, in some cases, visiting victims in person to gain physical access to computers, the FBI said in an alert Tuesday.

The closed group, which likely operates from Russia and emerged in 2022 after Conti disbanded, has claimed responsibility for more than 100 attacks with activity surging during the past few months, according to researchers.

The FBI’s warning comes exactly one year after the agency released a previous alert about Silent Ransom Group consistently targeting law firms since mid-2023. The group doesn’t deploy encryption, but its dual use of social engineering and in-person visits for data theft is extremely rare with no known parallels across the vast cybercrime ecosystem, multiple experts told CyberScoop.

“There were probably a lot of times that this failed before it started succeeding because there’s a lot of trial-and-error involved,” said Allan Liska, field chief information security officer at Recorded Future. Whereas other ransomware groups would rather move on to other tactics or targets, “Silent Ransom Group has seen the value especially in going after law firms, and so they’re willing to put the extra effort into it,” he added. 

The data extortion group, which is also tracked as Chatty Spider, UNC3753 and Storm-0252, isn’t as prolific as more high-tempo ransomware groups. Yet, it’s having a noticeable impact due to its proven knack for attacking organizations in the legal sector.

Halcyon tracked 134 ransomware incidents against law firms and legal services during the first quarter of this year, making it the fourth-most targeted industry accounting for more than 6% of all ransomware attacks the company tracked during the period. 

Silent Ransom Group and Inc, a ransomware-as-a-service operation dating back to mid-2023, are largely responsible for that uptick, said Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at Halycon’s Ransomware Research Center.

“Silent was the first group to really just be targeting law firms, and they’ve targeted major law firms” with a clear understanding of what’s most problematic for organizations in that segment, she added. “The theft of data in and of itself is the biggest issue for the law firms, so they’re tailoring a lot of their operations around what they know about the sector.”

Law firms are a rich target because data theft creates huge privilege and reputational problems, which creates the perception they might be more willing to pay high extortion demands, Kaiser said.

Silent Ransom Group’s social engineering scheme involves phone calls or phishing emails that urge employees to call one of the group’s associates posing as IT support, the FBI said. If the group’s attempt to gain access to the employee’s computer via remote access tools fails, it sends an associate to the victim’s location to physically attach a storage device to the victim’s workstation. 

This extra step is unique and places Silent Ransom Group in a completely different mode of operation than its peers in ransomware and data theft extortion. Some aggressive data theft extortion groups have harassed and threatened executives and employees with physical violence, but in-person visits for data theft are extraordinary.

“While Flashpoint has observed threat actors soliciting or co-opting both witting and unwitting insiders, we have not observed them physically sending attackers to victim locations. This tactic carries significant risk, as threat actors are able to use technology to obscure their real-world identities,” said Ian Gray, vice president of cyber threat intelligence operations at Flashpoint. 

Joe Slowik, director of cybersecurity alerting strategy at Dataminr, said it’s easy to question why potential victims would fall for this tactic. “However, humans in the workplace need to implicitly trust others to get their jobs done,” he said. 

“Questioning everything, while seemingly desirable, introduces significant friction and distrust in workplace environments and limits productivity in arbitrary ways,” Slowik added. “Criminal entities will continue to prey on human weaknesses and dependencies for success, and placing the burden solely on employees to defend against this is unfair and unreasonable.”

The FBI did not provide details about the people Silent Ransom Group uses to initiate the fake IT support calls or visit victims in person. Yet, with the group’s operators based in Russia, researchers speculate gig workers or subcontractors are playing a critical role by placing voice-based phishing calls in a common language and visiting victims at their workplace. 

Liska said he’s under the impression the group is using freelance taskers that don’t necessarily know they are committing a crime. “They may be suspicious, but you know, they need the money,” he said. 

“It’s kind of like a Doordash person that delivers Arby’s,” Liska said. “You know you’re doing really bad things to people, but you know what, they’re paying you to deliver.”

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Foxconn, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electronics sold by major tech vendors, is recovering from a cyberattack that disrupted some of the company’s factories in North America.

Nitrogen, a ransomware group that’s known for targeting organizations in the manufacturing, construction and technology sectors, claimed responsibility for the attack on its data leak site and said it stole 8 terabytes of data spanning more than 11 million files. 

The threat group posted screenshots of some of the allegedly stolen data and claimed it compromised “confidential instructions, projects and drawings from Intel, Apple, Google, Dell, Nvidia and many other projects.” 

Foxconn is famously known as the primary assembler of Apple iPhones. Apple and the other companies allegedly impacted by the attack did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Foxconn confirmed some of its factories in North America suffered a cyberattack, and said its cybersecurity team immediately responded to the breach by implementing additional “measures to ensure the continuity of production and delivery.”

The spokesperson did not answer questions about when the attack occurred or what systems or data was impacted, but noted that “affected factories are currently resuming normal production” as of Tuesday. 

Nitrogen was first observed in 2023, using ALPHV, one of the most prevalent ransomware variants at that time, Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center, told CyberScoop. The group started using stolen code from Conti, another formerly prolific ransomware variant, in 2024 to build its own custom attack tools to hit Windows and VMware server environments, she added.

The threat group has most recently focused on companies in the manufacturing and technology sectors. “However, the most recent cases of claims by Nitrogen do not include a working file listing on the leak site and include mostly older images of files,” Kaiser said. “This raises questions about whether Nitrogen is inflating data-theft claims in an attempt to pressure victims into paying higher ransoms.”

Foxconn hasn’t described the nature of the attack or confirmed the existence of a ransom demand. 

Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of threat research and intelligence at Arctic Wolf Labs, said Nitrogen follows a “consistent playbook, stealing data before encrypting systems so they have leverage on multiple fronts, combining operational disruption with the threat of sensitive information being exposed.”

The threat group’s tactics indicate it’s not opportunistic, but rather “operating with a defined model, focusing on organizations that are easier to access but still critical enough to drive pressure and payment,” Valenzuela added. 

Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry with headquarters in Taiwan, is among the world’s largest companies with $259 billion in revenue last year, the company said. Foxconn’s North American footprint includes multiple factories in Mexico, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Indiana.

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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 small group of former Black Basta affiliates have targeted more than 100 employees across dozens of organizations to intrude network systems for potential data theft, ransomware deployment and extortion, according to ReliaQuest.

The social engineering campaign, which involves mass email bombing and Microsoft Teams help desk impersonation, surged last month and dates back to at least May 2025, ReliaQuest said in a report Tuesday. 

Attackers have primarily targeted senior leadership to gain highly privileged access. “Roughly three-quarters of targeted users were executives, directors, managers or similarly high-value roles,” researchers who worked on the report told CyberScoop via email. 

Cybercriminals involved in Black Basta, an offshoot of Conti, scattered after the threat group’s internal chat logs leaked online in February 2025, providing threat researchers and authorities key details about the group’s operations. 

German police publicly identified Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov, a Russian national, as Black Basta’s alleged leader in January. 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.

ReliaQuest said the recently observed campaign shares many similarities with previous Black Basta activity and follows the same playbook — tooling, targeting and execution style — associated with the once-prolific ransomware group. 

“That includes the repeated use of remote access tools, a strong concentration in sectors Black Basta historically favored, and a level of speed and coordination that suggests experienced operators are building on a playbook they already know works,” researchers said. 

“We’re careful not to treat any one artifact as definitive proof, but taken together, the similarities are strong enough that we assess it is highly likely former affiliates or closely aligned operators are involved,” ReliaQuest researchers added. 

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. Threat hunters warned that former members were still actively targeting additional victims earlier this year. 

ReliaQuest released its report, including indicators of compromise, after it observed a particularly sharp spike in activity in March, noting that the group’s targeting was more focused on senior employees.

“The operators are moving very quickly, with parts of the workflow becoming more automated or highly streamlined, which makes the campaign easier to scale and harder for defenders to interrupt before remote access is established,” researchers said.

The top-five sectors targeted in recent Black Basta-style attacks include manufacturing, professional services, finance and insurance, construction and technology, according to ReliaQuest.

Attackers typically bombard targeted employees with hundreds of emails within minutes and then contact targeted users, posing at IT support via direct messages on Microsoft Teams or a phone call. ReliaQuest said it’s observed some attackers achieve remote access minutes after the first sign of an email bomb.

Researchers did not say how many organizations have been successfully intruded as a result of this campaign thus far. 

While extortion appears to be the most likely objective, ReliaQuest cautioned against assuming every attack results in ransomware encryption.

“Based on what we’ve observed, the intrusion chain is built to gain access quickly, understand the environment, and create options for follow-on monetization,” researchers said. “That could lead to data theft, extortion without encryption, or ransomware deployment, depending on the victim and the opportunity.”

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