As a reminder, this cyberattack against the Osaka publisher notably caused the leak of personal information (name, address, telephone number, email address) of tens of thousands of employees or former employees, business partners, job candidates. hiring and other shareholders. Ragnar Locker had requested a payment of $11 million in bitcoin under penalty of revealing the 1 TB of confidential information recovered. To do this, the criminals used ransomware, hacking software that allows information to be encrypted on servers in order to demand a ransom in exchange for the key to decrypt it. Capcom having failed to respond to the demands of the criminals and appealed to the authorities, part of its plans as well as certain confidential details had consequently been scattered on the web. Several of this information was subsequently verified, notably the release of Monster Hunter Rise on PC, the announcement of Resident Evil 4 VR on Meta Quest 2 and the Ace Attorney collection. By Capcom’s admission, this leak did not, however, have a major impact on the excellent health of the group or on its games in preparation.
This braggart of Ragnar, you will not hear him again
However, at Capcom as at all the other victims of Ragnar Locker, which include the French shipping giant CMA CGMthe Greek natural gas transport manager DESFAthe Portuguese distributor of electrical energy Energy of Portugal or the Italian liqueur producer Campari Group, we must have a smile upon discovering the Europol press release. It is a coordinated action between the police and judicial authorities of eleven countries, including the Center for the fight against digital crimes of our National Gendarmerie, which made it possible to deal a severe blow to this group at the origin of numerous attacks since its first misdeeds in December 2019.
“ As part of an action carried out between October 16 and 20, searches were carried out in the Czech Republic, Spain and Latvia. The “primary target” of this malicious ransomware strain was arrested in Paris, France on October 16, and his home in the Czech Republic was raided. Five suspects were questioned in Spain and Latvia in the following days. At the end of the week of action, the main perpetrator, suspected of being a developer of the Ragnar group, was brought before the investigating judges of the Paris judicial court. Ransomware infrastructure was also seized in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, and the website associated with the Tor data leak was taken down in Sweden », We can read in the press release from the authorities. This international dragnet follows a first series of arrests in Ukraine in October 2021, which led to the capture of two major Ragnar Locker operators with the help of investigators from the French gendarmerie and the American FBI.