The U.S. Division of State and the Secret Service have introduced a reward of $2,500,000 for info resulting in Belarusian nationwide Volodymyr Kadariya (Владимир Кадария) for cybercrime actions.
The 38-year-old man is needed for his participation in varied malware and on-line rip-off operations, together with the Angler Exploit Equipment, for which he managed malvertising operations between October 2013 and March 2022.
“The U.S. Division of State is providing a reward of as much as $2.5 million for info resulting in the arrest and/or conviction in any nation of Volodymyr Kadariya for his alleged participation in a big malware group,” reads an announcement on the U.S. Division of State web site.
The hacker, identified on-line by varied aliases together with “Stalin,” “Eseb,” and “baxus,” was first indicted with wire and laptop fraud in June 2023, however the indictment was unsealed solely on August 12, 2024.
At the moment, Kadariya was recognized as one in every of Maksim Silnikau’s co-conspirators, who participated in global-scale malware distribution operations with Andrei Tarasov.
Silnikau (aka “J.P. Morgan”), the creator and operator of Ransom Cartel, Reveton ransomware, and Angler Exploit Equipment, was arrested in Spain and later extradited to the US, the place he faces a number of fees incurring sentences of as much as 100 years in jail.
Supply: U.S. Secret Service
The Angler Exploit Equipment
Angler Exploit Equipment first appeared round 2013, shortly gaining prominence for its potential to leverage exploits in outdated software program like Adobe Flash, Java, Silverlight, and Web Explorer, to ship malware payloads onto the victims’ methods.
One of many frequent vectors for Angler was malvertising, the place malicious commercials had been positioned on professional web sites, which Kadariya was concerned in.
Angler Exploit Equipment’s operations started to wane round mid-2016, and by the top of that yr, the exploit package was thought-about now not lively. Its legacy and impression on victims worldwide, although, stay important.
Other than the Angler Exploit Equipment, Kadariya additionally employed “scareware” advertisements to convey pretend messages to web customers, tricking them into downloading malicious recordsdata on their computer systems or disclosing private and monetary info on phishing pages.
The Belarusian cybercriminal loved many monetization channels, together with promoting “logs” of stolen knowledge to different cybercriminals, promoting direct entry to methods compromised by Angler Exploit Equipment, and permitting deployment of customized payloads by means of it.
Proper now, the whereabouts of Kadariya are unknown, and any info resulting in his arrest or conviction will grant tipsters as much as $2,500,000.