Cybersecurity Professionals Plead Guilty to ALPHV/BlackCat Ransomware Attacks

Two cybersecurity professionals, Ryan Goldberg and Kevin Martin, have pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges after using their positions as a ransomware negotiator and incident response manager to conduct ransomware attacks with the ALPHV/BlackCat group. The pair, along with an unnamed co-conspirator, leveraged their infosec expertise to compromise five organizations—including a medical device company, a pharmaceutical firm, a doctor's office, an engineering company, and a drone manufacturer—between May and December 2023. They agreed to pay ALPHV administrators 20% of any ransom collected in exchange for access to the ransomware platform.

The only successful extortion resulted in a $1.2 million bitcoin payment from the medical device company, which was split among the perpetrators, with a portion sent to ALPHV. Patient photos stolen from the doctor's office were published on the gang’s leak site. Goldberg and Martin face up to 20 years in prison, with sentencing scheduled for March. Authorities highlighted the betrayal of trust, as both men used their cybersecurity training and privileged access to facilitate the very crimes they were supposed to prevent.