As cryptocurrencies are booming over past years, the hackers and scammers are also rising on the same hand. In addition, the U.S market is one of the largest and leading cryptocurrency marketplace in the world.
Moreover, as crypto hackers are playing their smart games, the governments are also keeping an eye on all crypto related activities in the country. Thus, as per the record from last year, U.S law enforcers seized over $30 million of crypto assets related to NetWalker ransomware.
Moreover, this seizure records to be the largest ever in relation to the ransomware software in January 2021 as per the report of Chainalysis, a blockchain research company.
(1/3) Congratulations to law enforcement on their seizure of $30M+ worth of #crypto related to last year’s disruption of NetWalker #ransomware. It was made public last week and is the largest seizure ever related to ransomware.https://t.co/cHOM5KqFri pic.twitter.com/vMzpOUZfOG
— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) February 15, 2022
Largest Crypto Seizure of 2021
The U.S law enforcement involved in the cyber activity, seized almost different cryptocurrencies from the hackers. Significantly it includes, the top digital currency 720 Bitcoins (BTC) and a altcoin of 15.7 monero (XMR). More so, in estimating the overall value of these seized crypto’s are over $30 million as per the current market price.
Besides, to be more informative, the Netwalker ransomware is the fastest growing ransomware software developed by the cybercrime team in 2019. Further, the main function of ransomware is to detect any malware activities. However, it identifies the suspicious acts through phishing emails, by exfiltrating and encrypting confidential data for large ransom.
Thus, NetWalker attackers extracted millions of dollars from many business giants and government authorities in 2020. Thereby safely encrypting the victims connections and computer networks. Further, some hackers used the ransomware as a service model and shooted attacks. Thereby sharing the profits to the NetWalker ransomware group.
In such cases, one of the prominent hackers is Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins who gained over $14 million BTC in 2018 and worth of $27 million BTC by January 2021. Following his hack, the U.S law enforcers seized $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin from the popular crypto exchange Bitfinex.
