LockBit and its members have targeted governments, big businesses, schools and institutions, causing billions of dollars of damage and capturing tens of millions in kickbacks from patients.
Usually, their programmes – when inserted by the ransom controller into a user’s IT systems– are manipulated to thaw, via cryptography, the target’s files and data.
Next month, the leaders of LockBit, which they claim extorted billions of dollars from thousands of victims, were put on notice by the United States, Britain, and Australia.
The UK government claims that the team extorted “over US$ 1 billion from thousands of victims global” and that it was responsible for a third of all malware problems globally last year.
The top five states hit by LockBit were the United States, Britain, France, Germany and China, according to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency.