He demanded exorbitant ransoms, from 5 to 70 million euros, to return the siphoned data. His greed led him to his downfall when French cyberinvestigators followed the “money trail”, the traces of extorted cryptocurrencies. The American authorities, led by the FBI, and European authorities announced last Thursday the arrest in Canada at the end of October of Mikhael Vasiliev, a Russian-Canadian national. This 30-year-old was suspected of having notably deployed the LockBit ransomware to carry out attacks against major infrastructures and large industrial groups around the world. According to the Paris prosecutor’s office, he attacked nearly 2,000 targets, including 115 leading French victims such as the Marseille shipowner CMA-CGM or the electronics specialist LDLC.
