Key facts:
The man kept a percentage of the 2,000 bitcoins he earned from his attacks.
700 bitcoins, equivalent to USD 30 million, were seized from him by the Canadian authorities.
Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, a Canadian dubbed a “sophisticated cyberterrorist” was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison after pleading guilty to participating in a series of ransomware or data hijacking attacks on more than 17 entities in his country.
The man was arrested in January last year as part of an operation in which 700 bitcoins were seized (over $30 million at today’s price), in a move that has been hailed as one of the largest cryptocurrency seizures by the Canadian government.
In a document court, the judge who heard the case said that Vachon-Desjardins pleaded guilty to violating the security of companies to access their systems and demanding payments in bitcoin for ransonware attacks. In addition, he acknowledged having trained other criminals to carry out these crimes, thus expanding his network of operations.
The judge said that, during a nine-month period between May 2020 and January 2021, Vachon-Desjardins attacked companies and institutions around the world and earned more than 2,000 BTC from their ransom demands. Of these, the suspect kept 1,200 bitcoins, while the rest was sent to the creators of the NetWalker ransomware, whose identity is unknown.
Along with funds in bitcoin, from Vachon-Desjardins bank accounts More than $100,000 was also seized. Canadians. “He is a sophisticated cyberterrorist who took advantage of entities in the education, health, government and commercial sectors,” said Ontario court judge G. Paul Renwick.
He played a dominant, almost exclusive, role in these crimes and helped NetWalker and other affiliates improve their ability to extort money from their victims and disguise their profits.
Judge Paul Renwick of Ontario.
Bitcoin for ransomware ransom
The researchers reported that they had found more than 20 Terabytes of data stolen from the hacked organizations in the Vachon-Desjardins home before deploying the ransomware. The ways in which his criminal organization operated were reported by CriptoNoticias last year.
“I was told that the data seized from the defendant, if printed, would fill an entire hockey arena,” Judge Renwick said in the sentencing document.
Ransomware is a virus that blocks access to files on infected computers, allowing an attacker to take control of the data. The cybercriminals then hold the data for ransom and demand payment in exchange for the victim restoring their access to the files. Criminals threaten to leak data if payment is not received.
The judge also said that police tracked down Vachon-Desjardins through his IP and email addressesas well as personal information that he revealed on social networks detected by the researchers.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, in November of last year Europol arrested twelve suspects in Ukraine and Switzerland of being part of a global network of cybercriminals, responsible for 1,800 ransomware attacks in 71 countries. The group requested BTC for the payment of their ransoms, which was used by the police to map the transfers, as part of their intelligence work.
Although all transactions in the Bitcoin network are public, and there are no linked names or an address, still, through analysis software, various companies and governments can trace and link the identities of people involved in suspicious activities.