The Ransomware Gang That Went Legit (Sort Of)

You know things are weird when a ransomware group announces they’re shutting down and pivoting to “legitimate security consulting.”

That’s exactly what happened last month with BlackVault, a cybercrime operation that’s been extorting companies since 2022. They published a farewell message on their dark web leak site—yes, they have a leak site, it’s a whole thing—claiming they’re “retiring” and will now help companies defend against attacks. The audacity is almost impressive.

I spoke with three cybersecurity researchers about this. None of them bought it. “It’s either a rebrand or law enforcement got close,” one told me off the record. The other theory? They made enough money and want to cash out before things get hot.

Here’s what’s actually interesting: they’re probably right that they could make decent money consulting. These groups understand attack vectors better than most enterprise security teams. They know exactly where companies are vulnerable because they’ve been exploiting those gaps for years.

But let’s be real—nobody’s hiring ex-ransomware operators as consultants. The legal liability alone would be insane. What’s more likely is that individual members will quietly filter into the legitimate security industry under new identities. It happens more than people think.

The bigger story here is what their retirement announcement revealed: they claimed to have hit 127 organizations across 19 countries. We knew about maybe 40 of those publicly. That means dozens of companies paid ransoms quietly and never reported the breaches.

That unreported number is the real problem. When companies pay silently, we lose visibility into attack patterns. We can’t improve defenses if we don’t know how attackers are succeeding.

I asked a CISO at a Fortune 500 company whether they’d ever consider paying a ransom quietly. Long pause. “Off the record? If it meant avoiding a stock price crash and regulatory nightmares? I’d at least run the numbers.”

There’s your cybersecurity landscape in 2024: sophisticated criminals retiring rich, companies making calculated decisions to pay up and shut up, and the rest of us trying to piece together what’s actually happening from the shadows.