Security News > 2020 > August > Forget your space-age IT security systems. It might just take a $1m bribe and a willing employee to be pwned

A Russian citizen is accused of flying to America in a bid to bribe a Nevada company employee to infect their bosses' IT network with ransomware.

It is claimed Kriuchkov, 27, was the point man of a plot to get data-stealing malware onto the network of an unspecified US company in Nevada and then use the lifted data to extort the corporation for millions of dollars: paid up, or the internal files get leaked and file systems scrambled.

According special agent Michael Hughes, in late July Kriuchkov traveled from Russia to Reno, Nevada, where the employee worked, and over the early weeks of August tried to win over the employee to join the conspiracy.

The alleged plan was for Kriuchkov's crew back in Russia to hit the company with a distributed denial-of-service attack at a specific time in order to distract IT staff.

Unbeknownst to Kriuchkov and his associates, somewhere between their initial Lake Tahoe meetup on August 1 and their last meeting on August 18, the staffer had got cold feet, or had a head rush of ethics, and gone to the company's security department to share the whole sordid yarn, we're told.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/russian_malware_plot/