He applied for bail in May. In his application, he said he was still employed by the federal government but that his security clearance had been suspended pending an investigation by the PSPC. PSPC said The fifth estate in an email that “as of January 13, 2021, Mr. Vachon-Desjardins was no longer an employee of PSPC,” but did not confirm whether Vachon-Desjardins resigned or was fired, citing privacy concerns. It also said it “took swift action to protect PSPC employees, information and assets” once PSPC was made aware of “adverse” information, and after an internal investigation, found no evidence of a security breach or compromise of government information or assets . Before Vachon-Desjardins could be extradited, his pending drug charges and the RCMP ransomware case in Canada had to be resolved. “Once we had his actual devices, we were able to get a much clearer picture of what he was doing. We were able to see, somewhat more clearly, the number of victims that it evoked,” Gammons said. The RCMP discovered some of those victims include Canadian educational institutions and businesses. The researchers contacted some of the victims they had identified, including Amacon, a Vancouver real estate developer that had been attacked in August 2020. “We had kept good logs and were able to provide them with IP addresses and timestamps, access logs, range, and we were able to tie it all together, working with the RCMP to try to help put together a charge,” he said. Arthur Keech, the company’s director of IT. Amacon did not pay the $10,000 ransom. “I have a very strong position that you should never contact or consider ransom with these individuals,” Keech said
