In July, Russian citizen Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a 27 year old Russian, was identified as a member of a wider Russian cybercriminal gang, seeking to extort a Nevada company through malware.
Kriuchkov offered the employee of a major company $1,000,000 to install malware on corporate networks while the Russian gang would distract security teams with a DDoS attack. However, this plan failed when the employee revealed the scheme to the FBI. On Saturday, the FBI gathered enough evidence to arrest Kriuchkov and he has since been in custody.
In fact, according to Securonix’s Insider Threat Report, malicious insiders are one of the most frequent threat vectors for data exfiltration and data breaches. According to Shareth Ben, Director of Insider Threat at Securonix, “an employee or contractor had been identified as a flight risk in about 60% of the incidents
detected”. Fortunately, in this instance there was no malicious insider, however this regrettably a rare event.
