The FBI urges past victims of LockBit ransomware attacks to come forward after revealing that it has obtained over 7,000 LockBit decryption keys that they can use to recover encrypted data for free.
FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran announced this on Wednesday at the 2024 Boston Conference on Cyber Security.
"From our ongoing disruption of LockBit, we now have over 7,000 decryption keys and can help victims reclaim their data and get back online," the FBI Cyber Lead
said in a keynote.
"We are reaching out to known LockBit victims and encouraging anyone who suspects they were a victim to visit our Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov."
This call to action comes after law enforcement
took down LockBit's infrastructure in February 2024 in an international operation dubbed "Operation Cronos."
At the time, police seized 34 servers containing
over 2,500 decryption keys, which helped create a free LockBit 3.0 Black Ransomware decryptor.
After analyzing the seized data, the U.K.'s National Crime Agency and the U.S. Justice Department
estimate the gang and its affiliates have raked in up to $1 billion in ransoms following 7,000 attacks targeting organizations worldwide between June 2022 and February 2024.
