After Lockbit takedown, authorities openly mock hacker group

After long years of defeats and failures, international law enforcement authorities have finally succeeded in bringing down the Lockbit hacker collective. They took the opportunity to make fun of the former members of the group.

Who said the police don’t have a sense of humor? The major “Cronos” operation, led by Europol, the FBI and the British services (NCA), not only made it possible to undermine the Lockbit hacker group by taking their site offline, but also to prove that the forces of the The order knows how to handle satire.

Provocation towards Lockbit

While until now the Lockbit site was mainly used by hackers to brag about their exploits and demand ransoms, the platform has a completely different face now that the network has been dismantled. Or rather, it very closely resembles the previous site, but no longer displays the same content at all.

The police have in fact used the exact same design that was used by the Lockbit hackers, but have diverted it to promote the recently successful police operation and to publish all the useful information for the victims . The FBI, Europol and the NCA even slipped in a few insider jokes here and there.

Some screenshots, showing the extent of control that the police forces secretly exercised before the dismantling, are innocently named “This_is_really_bad.png”, “doesn’t_look_good.png” or even “oh_dear.png”, which we could translate literally by “It’s_truly_not_ideal.png”, “That_sent_pas_bon.png” and “Oh_mon_dieu.png” or more freely by something like “we got you, this site now belongs to the police”.

Ironic pseudo doxxing

That’s not all, using Lockbit’s staging codes, the authorities have also published a page soberly titled “Who is LockbitSupp? The 10 million dollar question» in reference to a statement made by the famous LockbitSupp (leader of the group) a few months earlier when the latter had put a price of 10 million on his own head to make the FBI crack down. From the big banner with a countdown (which ends on February 23) to the image with the chained wads of cash, the imitation of Lockbit’s doxxing ads is impeccably executed.

To drive the point home, an entire section of the site is even dedicated to those who have seen their data taken hostage by software distributed by Lockbit. It details the best way to recover your data with the help of law enforcement. Not sure that victims like Thales would go to the trouble of searching the dark web for help, but it is certain that the team in charge of the operation had a lot of fun.

Source: Lockbit via Ars Technica