Zohar Pinhasi spent years telling ransomware victims his Florida company could get their files back without paying the attackers. But federal prosecutors now say Pinhasi’s firm simply paid the ransoms on behalf of victims at marked-up prices.

Pinhasi, 50, a U.S. and Israeli national from Hollywood, Florida, was arraigned Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn on two counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He owns MonsterCloud LLC, which the charging document calls a purported ransomware remediation company. Each count carries a maximum of 20 years.

FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle Jr., who leads the bureau’s New York field office, said, “As alleged, Zohar Pinhasi claimed to fix ransomware while never remediating the underlying threat. Instead, he turned the victim’s crisis into his own profit center.”

Pinhasi surrendered Wednesday, pleaded not guilty, and was released on a $2 million bond, the U.S. Attorney’s Office told BleepingComputer.

The indictment says the MonsterCloud website claimed “our team specializes in helping businesses recover their data without succumbing to ransom demands,” and that the firm did it with “advanced decryption techniques and cutting-edge technology” and “proprietary tools.” Paying a ransom, the site warned, would not guarantee any data would be recovered, might invite another attack, and reward illegal behavior.

Multiple businesses hired MonsterCloud specifically because they did not want to pay a cybercriminal and would not have authorized a payment, prosecutors allege. Many of them came in through the Contact Us form on the website, which the indictment treats as evidence they had read the firm’s marketing pitch.

Source link