Year: 2021
Court filings and enforcement actions initiated or unsealed during calendar year 2021.
Key Facts
- 6 major cases opened or unsealed in 2021.
- Cumulative losses identified for 2021 matters exceed $3.3 billion.
- Documented from federal indictments and official government disclosures.
Documented Matters for 2021
Colonial Pipeline DarkSide Ransomware Attack
DarkSide ransomware extortion against the largest refined petroleum pipeline system in the United States, forcing the shutdown of 5,500 miles of fuel pipelines and triggering widespread East Coast fuel shortages.
U.S. v. Yaroslav Vasinskyi (Kaseya VSA / REvil Ransomware)
Ukrainian national and REvil ransomware affiliate responsible for deploying the ransomware attack that hijacked Kaseya VSA management software, instantly encrypting up to 1,500 downstream businesses on July 4th weekend.
U.S. v. Alla Witte & Vladimir Dunaev (Trickbot Malware Group)
Key software developers and coders of the transnational Trickbot cybercrime group charged with infecting millions of victim computers with banking trojans and facilitating Conti/Ryuk ransomware deployments against hospitals.
U.S. v. Aleksandr Sikerin & Yevgeniy Polyanin (REvil Operations)
International enforcement action against REvil ransomware money exchangers and operators, recovering $6.1 million in ransomware proceeds extorted from businesses and local governments across the United States.
Log4Shell Ubiquitous Remote Code Execution Crisis (CVE-2021-44228)
Universal zero-day vulnerability in Apache Log4j (Log4Shell) where arbitrary JNDI lookup strings (${jndi:ldap://...}) processed by logger components permitted unauthenticated remote code execution, triggering mass scanning and exploitation across billions of enterprise cloud servers by nation-state actors and ransomware syndicates worldwide.
U.S. v. FIN8 Conspirators (Badhatch Hospitality POS Malware)
Federal criminal indictment and investigative findings documenting financially motivated threat syndicate FIN8, which deployed Badhatch and Sardonic backdoors into point-of-sale memory across nationwide hotel and restaurant chains, scraping hundreds of thousands of customer payment cards.