GoKawiilTwo former employees of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint were sentenced to four years in prison each for targeting U.S. companies in BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware attacks.
40-year-old Ryan Clifford Goldberg (a former Sygnia incident response manager) and 36-year-old Kevin Tyler Martin (a DigitalMint ransomware negotiator) were charged in November and pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to obstruct commerce by extortion.
Together with 41-year-old Angelo Martino, a third accomplice who also pleaded guilty in April, the two acted as BlackCat ransomware affiliates between May 2023 and November 2023, breaching the networks of multiple victims across the United States.
According to court documents, they paid a 20% share of ransoms in exchange for access to BlackCat's ransomware and extortion platform.
The list of victims includes a Maryland pharmaceutical company, a Tampa medical device manufacturer, a California engineering firm, a Virginia drone manufacturer, and a California doctor's office.
Prosecutors said the Tampa medical device company paid $1.27 million after its servers were encrypted and it received a $10 million ransom demand in May 2023, with the payment laundered and split three ways with Martino.
While other companies whose networks were breached by Goldberg and Martin also received ransom demands ranging from $300,000 to $10 million, the indictment does not indicate whether they received any additional payments.
"These defendants exploited specialized cybersecurity knowledge not to protect victims, but to extort them," said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones on Thursday. "They used ransomware to lock down critical systems, steal sensitive data, and pressure American businesses into paying to regain access to their own information."
"We strongly condemn these former employees' criminal behavior, which violated our values, ethical standards, and the law. When we learned about the conduct, we immediately terminated both individuals," DigitalMint CEO Jonathan Solomon also told BleepingComputer earlier this month after Martino pleaded guilty.
The FBI previously linked the BlackCat ransomware gang to more than 60 breaches between November 2021 and March 2022.
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