US puts up $2.5M bounty for Belarusian hacker’s arrest, conviction

Rewards of up to $2.5 million have been introduced by the U.S. State Department for any information that would help apprehend or convict Belarusian hacker Volodymyr Kadariya, according to The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

Malvertising campaigns promoting risky software have allegedly been launched by Kadariya, also known as Eseb, baxus, and Stalin, to facilitate widespread device compromise with the Angler Exploit Kit and other malicious payloads between Oct. 2013 and Mar. 2022, said the State Department in a statement. Stolen device access, login credentials, and banking details have been peddled by Kadariya and his associates across Russian cybercrime forums, an indictment showed. Such a development comes weeks after the arrest and extradition of Belarusian-Ukrainian hacker Maksim Silnikau, who is a co-conspirator of Kadariya. Aside from allegedly developing the Angler Exploit Kit, Silnikau also led the Reveton ransomware-as-a-service business model, which is the first of its kind.