The department says 33-year-old Mikhail Vasiliev of Bradford, Ont., is charged with conspiracy to intentionally damage protected computers and transmit ransom demands in connection with his alleged role in the global LockBit ransomware program. The department describes LockBit in court documents as a ransomware variant that first appeared around January 2020 and has since become one of the most active and destructive campaigns in the world, having been deployed against at least 1,000 victims in the US and beyond. It claims that LockBit has made at least $100 million in ransom demands and extracted tens of millions of dollars in actual ransom payments from victims. He says the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating LockBit around March 2020. Vasiliev faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison if convicted.
