The FBI’s most wanted hacker, Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev, dubbed the “Moriarty” of cybercrime, has finally been arrested by Russian authorities. Described by the FBI as a “prolific” cybercriminal, Matveev has had a $10 million bounty on his head for any information leading to his arrest since 2023.
The arrest is a turning point on the part of the Russian authorities, as cybercriminals have long seen Russia as a safe haven. According to intelligence sources, this could either represent an attempt to try and legitimize the Russian economy or an indication that the state is taking back control of cyber-attacks on Western economies.
According to Russian authorities, Matveev has been linked to hacker groups who specialize in encrypting data and demanding ransoms for the unblocking of the data, typically targeting large companies. He is being charged under Part 1 of Article 273 of Russia’s Criminal Code,
“At present, the investigator has collected sufficient evidence, and the criminal case with the indictment signed by the prosecutor has been sent to the Central District Court of the city of Kaliningrad”, stated the Ministry of Affairs.
In 2023, US authorities accused Matveev of involvement in several Lockbit, Babuk, and Hive ransomware attacks. These include attacks on police departments in New Jersey and Washington DC, as well as intentional damage to US-based companies. When issuing the $10 million bounty, the Department of Justice (DOJ) described Russia as a “safe haven for cybercriminals, an environment in which ransomware actors are free to conduct malicious cyber operations against the US.”
Matveev has also allegedly helped develop some ransomware variants that have garnered over $200 million in extortion fees. Matveev was also previously linked to a breach in the UK’s Ministry of Defense, in which thousands of confidential documents were leaked from secretive government facilities including a nuclear submarine base and a chemical weapons development lab.
Head of drug-selling platform Hydra Sentenced for Life
In similar news, a Moscow court has given the head of drug-selling platform Hydra, Stanislav Moiseyev, a life sentence. The court has also sentenced 15 of his accomplices to sentences ranging from 8 to 25 years, and fines totaling over $158,000. Russian law enforcement seized almost one ton of drugs and substances and confiscated other assets such as cars and real estate. Hydra offered a variety of drugs, psychotropic substances, and illicit services such as fraudulent legal documents, money laundering and mixing, and hacking tools and services.
In 2022 German authorities were able to seize Hydra’s servers together with e-wallets containing $25 million in Bitcoin. At the time of the seizure, Hydra was the world’s largest and longest-running dark web market. It received a total of $5.2 billion from illicit services and transactions and accounted for a staggering 80 percent of the world’s dark web-related transactions.
