Security News
Grocery stores and pharmacies belonging to Canadian food retail giant Sobeys have been experiencing IT systems issues since last weekend.Sobeys is one of two national grocery retailers in Canada, with 134,000 employees servicing a network of 1,500 stores in all ten provinces under multiple retail banners, including Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, Foodland, FreshCo, Thrifty Foods, and Lawtons Drugs.
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced charges against a dual Russian and Canadian national for his alleged participation in LockBit ransomware attacks across the world.Also found were a text file with instructions to deploy LockBit ransomware, the malware's source code, and a website that's believed to be the control panel operated by the group to administer the ransomware.
A former affiliate of the Netwalker ransomware has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in the U.S., a little over three months after the Canadian national pleaded guilty to his role in the crimes. Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, 35, has also been ordered to forfeit $21,500,000 that was illicitly obtained from dozens of victims globally, including companies, municipalities, hospitals, law enforcement, emergency services, school districts, colleges, and universities.
The choice of Tampa for his trial was because a known victim of one of his "NetWalker" ransomware attacks is based there. The NetWalker Ransomware was a specific type of malicious software that was used to compromise and restrict access to a victim's computer network in an effort to extort a ransom.
A former Canadian government employee this week agreed to plead guilty in the U.S. to charges related to his involvement with the NetWalker ransomware syndicate. The 34-year-old IT consultant from Gatineau, Quebec, was initially apprehended in January 2021 following a coordinated law enforcement operation to dismantle the dark web infrastructure used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data siphoned from its victims.
US prosecutors on Thursday said they have extradited a Canadian man to America to face charges that he conspired to distribute ransomware.The Justice Department identifies Vachon-Desjardins as "a former Canadian government employee" without specifying which government agency.
A Canadian who used the Netwalker ransomware to attack 17 organisations and had C$30m in cash and Bitcoin when police raided his house has been jailed for more than six years. Sebastien Vachons-Desjardins of Gatineau, Ottawa, was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison earlier this month after pleading guilty to five criminal charges in Ontario's Court of Justice.
Investigations that ran in parallel over nearly two years by Canadian and U.S. law enforcement have led to this week's arrest of an Ottawa man, who is alleged to have an extensive track record of ransomware attacks on companies, governments and individuals. The highly-publicized arrest is a message to North American ransomware operators - law enforcement is on the case.
A Canadian man is accused of masterminding ransomware attacks that caused "Damage" to systems belonging to the US state of Alaska. A federal indictment against Matthew Philbert, 31, of Ottawa, was unsealed yesterday, and he was also concurrently charged by the Canadian authorities with a number of other criminal offences at the same time.
A Canadian teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing $37 million worth of cryptocurrency via a SIM swap scam, making it the largest virtual cash heist affecting a single person yet, according to police. "The joint investigation revealed that some of the stolen cryptocurrency was used to purchase an online username that was considered to be rare in the gaming community," according to a statement from Hamilton Police.