Canadian cybersecurity executive arrested as FBI cracks down on ShinyHunters ransomware gang
A Canadian cybersecurity expert has been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of a broader investigation into the infamous ransomware gang ShinyHunters, known for its hacks on healthcare and the public sector.
Edward Dubrovsky, 54, was arrested in Pennsylvania on Thursday, court documents revealed by multiple media outlets show. FBI Director Kash Patel did not name the accused when announcing on social media that his office had taken “another suspected co-conspirator of the ShinyHunters group” into custody, but the timing and other media reports, including from Fox Business, Reuters and the New York Times have linked Dubrovsky to the arrest.
Officially, Dubrovsky is an executive at a cybersecurity firm, whose job it is to work with victims of ransomware attacks, helping them to negotiate payments with hackers to have their data unencrypted or deleted, based on the circumstances surrounding the hack.
In this case, the FBI is interested in ShinyHunters, which has claimed to have a detailed data trove on FBI employees, including names, personal details, contact information and more. The group is believed to have been able to access the data via a hack on third-party vendor which manages FBIJobs.gov
According to Politico, Dubrovsky was arrested while attending a cybersecurity conference in the Philadelphia area.
At present, the FBI has not formally stated publicly that it believes Dubrovsky is working with the ransomware gang. The indictment against him lists charges as "conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money,” and "interference with commerce by threats,” related to extortion, court documents reveal.
He has yet to enter a plea.
Healthcare data breaches aplenty
ShinyHunters is a prolific ransomware gang, infamous in the cybercrime world for its successful data breaches. This year, it was responsible for the largest healthcare cybersecurity incident in terms of victims, that being the July hack on DentaQuest, the second largest dental insurance company in the nation.
Victims of that breach total roughly 15 million.
Another cyberattack from August may be larger, however, the number of victims is still being officially counted—that being on the pharmaceutical distributor McKesson, which was revealed by ShinyHunters themselves.
The hackers claim to have taken records on “tens of millions” of patients, resulting from a successful phishing attack on McKesson. That hack was revealed in an exclusive from CyberInsider, to whom ShinyHunters said it had taken more than 284 million individual documents.
In April, ShinyHunters was also linked to the data breach on Irish-American medical device company Medtronic. The cybercrime syndicate revealed the incident on its dark web blog, where it threatened to put up the data for sale.
Over the years a few individuals have been arrested suspected of being a part of the gang, but the identities of its current members remain unknown.
In this latest crackdown, the FBI has yet to reveal any names of suspects linked to the group.
Chad is an award-winning writer and editor with over 15 years of experience working in media. He has a decade-long professional background in healthcare, working as a writer and in public relations.