The U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday introduced costs in opposition to a 36-year-old Yemeni nationwide for allegedly deploying the Black Kingdom ransomware in opposition to international targets, together with companies, colleges, and hospitals in the US.
Rami Khaled Ahmed of Sana’a, Yemen, has been charged with one rely of conspiracy, one rely of intentional injury to a protected pc, and one rely of threatening injury to a protected pc. Ahmed is assessed to be presently residing in Yemen.
“From March 2021 to June 2023, Ahmed and others contaminated pc networks of a number of U.S.-based victims, together with a medical billing companies firm in Encino, a ski resort in Oregon, a college district in Pennsylvania, and a well being clinic in Wisconsin,” the DoJ stated in a press release.
Ahmed is accused of growing and deploying the ransomware by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Trade Server referred to as ProxyLogon.
The ransomware labored by both encrypting knowledge from victims’ pc networks or claiming to steal that data from the networks. Submit encryption, the ransomware dropped a ransom observe on the system and directed the sufferer to ship $10,000 value of Bitcoin to a cryptocurrency tackle managed by a co-conspirator.
Victims had been additionally allegedly requested to ship proof of the cost to a Black Kingdom e mail tackle. The ransomware is estimated to have been delivered on about 1,500 pc programs within the U.S. and elsewhere.
Additionally tracked beneath the identify Pydomer, the ransomware household has been beforehand linked to assaults making the most of Pulse Safe VPN vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-11510), Microsoft revealed in late March 2021, noting that it was the primary present ransomware household to capitalize on the ProxyLogon flaws.
Cybersecurity vendor Sophos described the Black Kingdom as “considerably rudimentary and amateurish in its composition,” with the attackers leveraging the ProxyLogon vulnerability to deploy net shells, which had been then used to challenge PowerShell instructions to obtain the ransomware.
It additionally stated the exercise bears all of the hallmarks of a “motivated script-kiddie.” Then later that August, a Nigerian menace actor was noticed making an attempt to recruit workers by providing them to pay $1 million in Bitcoin to deploy Black Kingdom ransomware on firms’ networks as a part of an insider menace scheme.
If convicted, Ahmed faces a most sentence of 5 years in federal jail for every rely. The case is being investigated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with help from the New Zealand Police.
The costs come amid a raft of bulletins from U.S. authorities authorities in opposition to numerous prison actions –
- The DoJ unsealed an indictment charging Ukrainian citizen Artem Stryzhak with attacking firms utilizing Nefilim ransomware since changing into an affiliate in June 2021. He was arrested in Spain in June 2024 and extradited to the US on April 30, 2025. If convicted of the cost, Stryzhak faces as much as 5 years’ imprisonment.
- Tyler Robert Buchanan, a British nationwide suspected of being a member of the infamous Scattered Spider cybercrime group, was extradited from Spain to the US to face costs associated to wire fraud and aggravated identification theft. Buchanan was arrested in Spain in June 2024. Fees in opposition to him and different Scattered Spider members had been introduced by the US in November 2024.
- Leonidas Varagiannis (aka Battle), 21, and Prasan Nepal (aka Trippy), 20, the 2 alleged leaders of a kid extortion group 764 have been arrested and charged with directing and distributing little one sexual abuse materials (CSAM). The 2 males are accused of exploiting at the very least eight minor victims.
- Richard Anthony Reyna Densmore, one other member of 764, was sentenced to 30 years within the U.S. in November 2024 for sexually exploiting a toddler. Members of 764 are affiliated with The Com, a disparate assortment of loosely related teams that commit financially motivated, sexual, and violent crimes. It additionally consists of Scattered Spider.
- The U.S. Treasury Division’s Monetary Crimes Enforcement Community (FinCEN) designated Cambodia-based conglomerate HuiOne Group as an “establishment of major cash laundering concern” for Southeast Asian transnational cybercrime gangs by facilitating romance baiting scams and for serving as a essential node for laundering proceeds of cyber heists carried out by the Democratic Folks’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). HuiOne Pay’s banking license was revoked in March 2025 by the Nationwide Financial institution of Cambodia.
Ransomware Assaults Surge as Payoffs Dwindle
The developments come as ransomware continues to be an enduring menace, albeit more and more fragmented and risky, as sustained regulation enforcement actions are inflicting main shifts in noticed techniques. This consists of the rising frequency of encryption-less assaults and the pattern of cybercriminals shifting away from conventional hierarchical teams in favor of a lone-wolf method.
“Ransomware operations have gotten more and more decentralized, with a rising variety of former associates selecting to function independently somewhat than stay tied to established teams,” Halcyon stated.
“This shift is being pushed by a number of components, together with elevated regulation enforcement coordination, profitable takedowns of main ransomware infrastructure, and a broader push by actors to keep away from attribution by model rotation or unbranded campaigns.”
Information compiled by Verizon exhibits that 44% of all analyzed breaches in 2024 concerned the usage of a ransomware pressure, up from 32% in 2023. However there may be excellent news: Extra victims than ever are refusing to pay ransoms and fewer organizations are prepared to pay the ransom demanded.
“For the calendar yr 2024, the median ransom paid comes up as $115,000, which is a lower from $150,000 within the earlier yr,” Verizon stated in its 2025 Information Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). “64% of the sufferer organizations didn’t pay the ransoms, which was up from 50% two years in the past.”
In response to Coveware, the common ransom cost for the primary quarter of 2025 was $552,777, a 0.2% lower from the earlier quarter. The media ransom cost, in distinction, climbed 80% by $200,000.
“The speed of firms that opted to pay a ransom, both to obtain decryption keys or to suppress a menace actor from posting the breached knowledge on their leak website, rose barely in Q1 2025,” the corporate stated.
The ransomware cost decision price for the interval has been tallied at 27%, down from 85% in Q1 2019, 73% in Q1 2020, 56% in Q1 2021, 46% in Q1 2022, 45% in Q1 2023, and 28% in Q1 2024.
“Whereas assaults are assuredly nonetheless occurring and new teams proceed to spin up every month, the well-oiled ransomware machine that early RaaS teams constructed is plagued with issues that appear unlikely to resolve,” it added.
Regardless of these setbacks, ransomware exhibits no signal of stopping anytime quickly, with Q1 2025 witnessing 2,289 reported incidents, a 126% enhance in comparison with Q1 2024, per Test Level. Ransomware assaults, nonetheless, have witnessed a 32% drop month-over-month in March 2025, with a complete of 600 claimed incidents.
North America and Europe accounted for greater than 80% of the instances. Client items and companies, enterprise companies, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, and development and engineering had been the sectors essentially the most focused by ransomware.
“Ransomware incident volumes are reaching unprecedented ranges,” Dr. Darren Williams, Founder and CEO of BlackFog, stated. “This presents ongoing challenges for organisations coping with attackers targeted on disruption, knowledge theft, and extortion. Completely different teams will emerge and disband, however all of them concentrate on the identical finish objective, knowledge exfiltration.”
