Search Results: BLACKBYTE (5)

Black Basta walked out of the Conti collapse in 2022 and rapidly became one of the top RaaS programs in the world, with a particular taste for healthcare and critical infrastructure. Then internal chats leaked again — and the playbook started looking familiar.

Ryuk was the Russian-speaking operation that proved you could ransom a Fortune 500 company for tens of millions of dollars and get away with it. It is also the operation whose people went on to run Conti — and, by extension, half the modern ransomware ecosystem.

Conti was the most corporate ransomware operation of its era — payroll, HR, R&D, the works — until an internal leak in 2022 exposed the entire enterprise and its political alignment. Here is how it grew, how it operated, and how it collapsed into a network of successor brands.

Ransomware-as-a-Service turned ransomware from a craft into a franchise. Core developers write the malware, affiliates run the intrusions, and revenue is split. Here is how RaaS works, who plays which role, and why it has been so hard to disrupt.

Ransomware did not start with Bitcoin. It started in 1989, on floppy disks mailed to AIDS researchers, and spent thirty years evolving into the multibillion-dollar criminal industry we know today.