The US dismantled the notorious hacker group that attacked more than 1,500 people

According to Reuters, on January 26, the FBI announced that it had secretly attacked and dismantled the Hive hacker group, thereby stopping a plot to use ransomware to demand more than $ 130 million against more than 300 victims. core.

Hive is a group of hackers who specialize in using malicious code to demand ransom. Researcher Brett Callow of the cybersecurity company Emsisoft assessed that this is one of the most active cybercriminal groups.

At the press conference, US Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that government information technology experts had secretly infiltrated the system of the hacker group. Hive since July 2022.

Authorities tracked the group’s activities in detail, and collected digital keys that they used to access the data of the target organizations. As a result, the authorities can promptly warn victims in advance so that they can take measures to protect the system, before the Hive group demands to pay a ransom. Minister Garland said the investigation is still ongoing.

According to the US Department of Justice, over the years, Hive has attacked more than 1,500 victims in 80 countries around the world and collected ransoms worth more than $100 million.

Earlier, on the morning of January 26, Hive’s website was down and only displayed a message with the content that the FBI had confiscated this website in a coordinated law enforcement campaign to prevent the Hive hacker group from using it. ransomware. In addition, the German Federal Criminal Police and the Dutch National High-Tech Crime Unit have also seized Hive’s servers.

German police commissioner Udo Vogel and Baden-Wuerttemberg state prosecutors emphasized that extensive cooperation across borders and continents is the key to effectively preventing serious cybercrime.

The Hive hacking case is different from a number of cases that the US Department of Justice has announced in recent years. Typically, the 2021 cyberattack targeted Colonial Pipeline – the largest US fuel pipeline operator. In that case, the US Department of Justice seized about $2.3 million in cryptocurrency ransoms after the company paid hackers. In this incident, authorities promptly warned before Hive demanded ransom.