EDITORIAL: It is welcome news that an international operation led by the US and UK law enforcement agencies has severely disrupted “the world’s most harmful cybercrime group”, the ransomware specialist called LockBit that operated out of Russia.
Ransomware is something of an online hackers’ service, a business that leases its software and methods to others to use in exhorting money. And since LockBit and its affiliates have repeatedly targeted governments, major companies, even schools and hospitals – causing billions of dollars in damages and extracting tens of millions in ransom from victims – it’s appreciated that the world’s bigger powers had the good sense to work together for once, instead of trampling over each other in pursuit of their own narrow agendas.
It turns out that Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA), America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Europol and agencies from nine other countries had been sharing intelligence and working together in Operation Cronos, and finally infiltrated LockBit’s network and took control of its services.
This alone goes to show how deep this cybercrime specialist must have struck in these countries and how much money, not to mention sensitive information, it must have made their governments and businesses bleed.
Hence the boast from the NCA director general, “We have hacked the hackers”, as he announced the success, adding that “we have taken control of their infrastructure, seized their source code, and obtained keys that will help victims decrypt their systems”. The NCA also said that it had obtained more than 1,000 decryption keys and will contact UK-based victims “in the coming days and weeks to offer support and help them recover encrypted data”.
Clearly, there’s nothing quite like cybercrime of this sort that exposes the soft underbelly of governments and businesses in the IT- and AI- dominated new century. If the world’s leading countries, which are home to the biggest corporations, are suffering to the tune of billions at their hands, then nobody is really safe.
Before LockBit, US law enforcers shut down the Hive ransomware operation which had extorted more than $100m from victims across the world. It was then that LockBit remained as the biggest threat in this area. Yet even this success is no guarantee that this menace will not raise its head again.
Over the last few years, especially, hackers have also allegedly influenced, or tried to influence at least, elections in some of the world’s biggest democracies; including, if you believe sections of the western press, the US presidential election of 2016.
Countries like Pakistan, which always struggle with more than their fair share of problems, are habitually behind the curve when it comes to such matters. Yet we must not forget that no matter how great or grave our internal troubles, we will never be able to escape the reality and implications of our crucial and sometimes precarious geographic location.
Therefore, our government, especially our military, is always vulnerable to novelties of modern warfare that invariably take more time for us to understand than some of our enemies to prepare. We must be mindful of such developments and brush up our defences all the time.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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