Several police services, together with Europol and Eurojust, have tracked down and dismantled the group behind the Ragnar Locker ransomware. Several arrests have been made and five of the group’s servers have been seized in the Netherlands.
The international police operation took place between October 16 and 20, reports Europol. It was led by the French Gendarmerie, which worked together with police forces from the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the US.
Ragnar Locker has been active since December 2019. The group was, among other things, behind the hack of game developer and publisher Capcom in 2020 and stolen data last year from the police of the Belgian municipality of Zwijndrecht. The ransomware of the same name was used to infect Windows devices and used the Remote Desktop Protocol to gain access to the system. In 2021, two other leaders of the group were arrested in Ukraine and last year a suspect was arrested in Canada. This put the police forces in their sights on the other suspects.
The main suspect in this case was arrested in Paris last Monday and his house in the Czech Republic was searched. Furthermore, five other suspects were interviewed in Spain and Latvia. The main suspect has now been brought before the examining magistrate in Paris.
