The U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday introduced costs towards a 36-year-old Yemeni nationwide for allegedly deploying the Black Kingdom ransomware towards international targets, together with companies, colleges, and hospitals in the USA.
Rami Khaled Ahmed of Sana’a, Yemen, has been charged with one depend of conspiracy, one depend of intentional harm to a protected laptop, and one depend of threatening harm to a protected laptop. Ahmed is assessed to be at the moment residing in Yemen.
“From March 2021 to June 2023, Ahmed and others contaminated laptop networks of a number of U.S.-based victims, together with a medical billing companies firm in Encino, a ski resort in Oregon, a faculty district in Pennsylvania, and a well being clinic in Wisconsin,” the DoJ mentioned in an announcement.
Ahmed is accused of creating and deploying the ransomware by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Alternate Server often known as ProxyLogon.
The ransomware labored by both encrypting knowledge from victims’ laptop networks or claiming to steal that data from the networks. Put up encryption, the ransomware dropped a ransom observe on the system and directed the sufferer to ship $10,000 price of Bitcoin to a cryptocurrency handle managed by a co-conspirator.
Victims have been additionally allegedly requested to ship proof of the cost to a Black Kingdom electronic mail handle. The ransomware is estimated to have been delivered on about 1,500 laptop methods within the U.S. and elsewhere.
Additionally tracked below the identify Pydomer, the ransomware household has been beforehand linked to assaults profiting from 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 have been then used to situation PowerShell instructions to obtain the ransomware.
It additionally mentioned the exercise bears all of the hallmarks of a “motivated script-kiddie.” Then later that August, a Nigerian risk 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 risk scheme.
If convicted, Ahmed faces a most sentence of 5 years in federal jail for every depend. The case is being investigated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with help from the New Zealand Police.
The fees come amid a raft of bulletins from U.S. authorities authorities towards numerous legal 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 USA 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 USA to face costs associated to wire fraud and aggravated identification theft. Buchanan was arrested in Spain in June 2024. Fees towards him and different Scattered Spider members have been introduced by the US in November 2024.
- Leonidas Varagiannis (aka Warfare), 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 baby. 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 main 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 Individuals’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 everlasting risk, albeit more and more fragmented and unstable, as sustained regulation enforcement actions are inflicting main shifts in noticed ways. 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 strategy.
“Ransomware operations have gotten more and more decentralized, with a rising variety of former associates selecting to function independently slightly than stay tied to established teams,” Halcyon mentioned.
“This shift is being pushed by a number of elements, together with elevated regulation enforcement coordination, profitable takedowns of main ransomware infrastructure, and a broader push by actors to keep away from attribution by means of model rotation or unbranded campaigns.”
Knowledge compiled by Verizon reveals that 44% of all analyzed breaches in 2024 concerned the usage of a ransomware pressure, up from 32% in 2023. However there’s 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 mentioned in its 2025 Knowledge 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 accordance with Coveware, the typical 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 acquire decryption keys or to suppress a risk actor from posting the breached knowledge on their leak web site, rose barely in Q1 2025,” the corporate mentioned.
The ransomware cost decision charge 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 problems that appear unlikely to resolve,” it added.
Regardless of these setbacks, ransomware reveals no signal of stopping anytime quickly, with Q1 2025 witnessing 2,289 reported incidents, a 126% enhance in comparison with Q1 2024, per Verify Level. Ransomware assaults, nevertheless, 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. Shopper items and companies, enterprise companies, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, and development and engineering have been the sectors essentially the most focused by ransomware.
“Ransomware incident volumes are reaching unprecedented ranges,” Dr. Darren Williams, Founder and CEO of BlackFog, mentioned. “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 give attention to the identical finish objective, knowledge exfiltration.”