French authorities arrested a Russian national in Paris for allegedly helping the Hive ransomware gang with laundering their victims’ ransom payments. The suspect was found to have received millions of U.S. dollars from suspicious sources through digital wallets linked to his activity on social networks. Additionally, €570,000 worth of cryptocurrency assets were seized when the 40-year-old suspect, who is a resident of Cyprus, was detained. The French Ministry of the Interior mentioned that the suspect was referred to the specialized prosecutor’s office of the Paris judicial court. This arrest follows the seizure of Hive ransomware’s Tor websites in January and the FBI’s infiltration of the gang’s servers in July 2022. The FBI also obtained and provided victims with over 1,300 decryption keys, preventing approximately $130 million in ransom payments from reaching the cybercriminals. It was revealed that the Hive ransomware operation had extorted around $100 million from over 1,500 companies since June 2021. Since the downfall of the gang’s infrastructure, a new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation named Hunters International has emerged, using code previously used by the Hive ransomware operation. Despite code overlaps and similarities, the Hunters International collective denies being associated with the old ransomware gang, claiming to be a new ransomware service that purchased the encryptor source code from Hive’s developers and focusing on stealing data to pressure victims into paying ransoms.
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