Hive, the criminal hacker group have had its system dismantled through a police operation powered by international collaboration, and coordinated by the Dutch police
The hacker group Hive is infamously known for using a system of ransomware tagged hostage software to compromise the security of organisations and steal their money. A report from Europol has revealed that at least 100 million Euros have been collected through the Hive Ransomware affecting over 1500 companies in over 80 countries from June 2021 to date.
Although this is pleasant news, no actual arrests have been reported and the whereabouts of the fraudsters remain unknown.
Through coordinated collaboration involving a number of security agencies particularly Europol and the FBI the clampdown became a success story. The system of operation for the clampdown held in Netherlands and Portugal although the actual protocol through which the hackers’ servers were taken offline remains classified.
In a celebratory reaction to this incident Lisa Monaco, U.S. Assistant Attorney General summed it up that “hackers are hacked by the FBI.”
The far destructive activities of the Hive gang is not underreported as the system has preyed on a long chain of victims. The same Hive Software is fingered among the tools that was used to attack Mediamarkt in all its branches in Europe.
Same system was also said to have been used to digitally attack an undisclosed hospital (likely a group of hospitals in Illinois)Â forcing the hospital to discontinue use of digital sources for analogue, making it temporarily impossible for the hospital to admit new patients.
Ransomware attacks are similar to hostage situations in operation. Hackers use this tool to shutdown an organization’s system and demand a ransome to reactivate the system. Fortunately this recent clampdown also led to the discovery of how to reverse the hostage situation. These investigators have now helped companies to reverse their hostage situation, and recover their data which was held hostage without paying a ransome. It is projected that the success recorded by this police operation for the affected companies have saved them an aggregate of about 120 million Euros which could have ended up in the head of the gang.
As originally reported in
