DarkSide ransomware is part of a growing underground industry, experts say
On Monday, President Biden said that “there is no evidence from our intelligence people that Russia is involved,” referring to the Russian government. However, he indicated that there is evidence “the actor’s ransomware is in Russia,” concluding that “they have some responsibility to deal with this.” In countries like Russia, researchers have studied how independent hackers often work directly or indirectly with the state in intelligence operations and, in turn, are given leniency and discretion to make a living through criminal activity. Therefore, it’s likely the Russian government or intelligence services would have at least been aware of the activities of the hackers selling the DarkSide ransomware, even if they are not involved in the hackers’ day-to-day operations.
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the economy in the East Room of the White House on May 10, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
President Biden delivers remarks at the White House on Monday. (Getty Images)
Former top counterintelligence official William Evanina, in a tweet posted on Monday afternoon, wrote that DarkSide “is a criminal organization based in Russia,” which “cannot operate from within Russia without at least a tacit approval of the intelligence services or Moscow leadership.”
The Biden administration is focused on a broad effort to counter ransomware and increase the defenses of industrial control systems companies in particular.
According to Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, Anne Neuberger, who spoke during the White House press briefing on Monday, the FBI has been investigating the DarkSide ransomware variant since October and, beyond offering specific indicators of compromise and advice on mitigating attacks to potential victims, has been specifically working on disrupting the digital infrastructure, such as servers the attackers use to launch their attacks. The FBI recently teamed up with international partners to shut down infrastructure used to launch the costly and dangerous Emotet and NetWalker ransomware strains.
olo and LMK, two Snapchat apps that allow users to send anonymous messages, are no longer available to users of the social media platform after parent company Snap suspended them Tuesday.
The suspension comes in response to a lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of Kristin Bride, the mother of an Oregon teen who took his own life in 2020 after receiving bullying messages via Yolo and LMK for months.
That suit alleges that Yolo and LMK violated consumer protection law by failing to live up to their own terms of service and policies, and that anonymous messaging apps facilitate bullying to such a degree that they should be considered dangerous products. Both were integrated with the Snapchat messaging platform through Snap Kit, the company's suite of tools for third-party developers.
“In light of the serious allegations raised by the lawsuit, and out of an abundance of caution for the safety of the Snapchat community, we are suspending both Yolo and LMK’s Snap Kit integrations while we investigate these claims,” a Snap spokesperson wrote in a statement.
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The lawsuit sought to have Yolo and LMK immediately banned from Snap’s platform, along with other apps that lack safeguards against cyberbullying. The plaintiffs, who seek to represent all users of Snapchat, Yolo and LMK as a class — a group consisting of 92 million users — are also requesting damages for the alleged harms and misrepresentations.