Australian Government Sanctions Russian Hacker

An alleged leader of international ransomware group LockBit has been slapped with financial sanctions and banned from travelling to Australia. The Australian government named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, a Russian citizen, as having a “senior leadership role” in a criminal group that supplied a global network of hackers with the tools and infrastructure to carry out online attacks. The announcement was made overnight in co-ordination with authorities in the United Kingdom and the United States. LockBit was behind 18 per cent of reported Australian ransomware incidents in 2022-23 and targeted 119 people in Australia, the government said. UK authorities said Mr. Khoroshev was the person behind the alias LockBitSupp while U.S. authorities unsealed an indictment against him alleging he “acted as the LockBit ransomware group’s developer and administrator from its inception in or around September 2019” until this month....