Ragnar Locker, the ransomware group that claimed responsibility for hacking Capcom in 2020, has been "taken down" by international police. This comes after the group attempted to extort Capcom for $11 million in bitcoin, having accessed the personal information of an estimated 16,406 current and former employees.

Described as "one of the most dangerous ransomware operations", Ragnar Locker members were arrested in 11 different countries. The group were said to target "critical infrastructure across the world", including a hospital. Personal data was shared on its website's "wall of shame" if victims didn't pay up or tried to contact law enforcement.

Reportedly set up in 2019, Ragnar Locker soon targeted Capcom, accessing an estimated 1TB of sensitive data. The total amount of victims was estimated to be as high as 350,000, including customers, employees, and business partners.

But according to Europo (as spotted by VGC), this extortion has been put to an end. Authorities also appear to have taken down the group's website, thus removing the page's "wall of shame" that hosts the stolen data, and hopefully, preventing victims from having their information used against them.

"The Ragnar Locker group was known to employ a double extortion tactic, demanding extortionate payments for decryption tools as well as for the non-release of the sensitive data stolen," reads the press release on the arrests. "The threat level of Ragnar Locker was considered as high, given the group’s inclination to attack critical infrastructure."

It's not clear what will happen with the individuals who have been arrested, and they don't appear to have been named by authorities at the time of writing. However, they are far from the only hackers looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the gaming industry, coercing companies into handing over millions at a time.

Recently, Sony was targeted by hackers who claimed to have accessed "all" of its systems. The ransomware group said it had "data for sale", saying that Sony had declined to pay for the non-release of the information. There doesn't appear to have been an update on this situation just yet, although some had expressed doubts that the group had the information in the first place, claiming that the sizes of the files it had shown off as proof were too small. Still, it was enough to leave PlayStation users frightened that we'd see a repeat of the PSN outage in 2011, which affected 77 million users. So far, it's not clear who is affected by this recent supposed hack.

Posted: Oct 28, 2023 9:52 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/capcom-hackers-arrested-ransomware-2020/