Member of FIN7 Hacking Group Sentenced to 5-Years in Prison

The FIN7 hacking group was deemed to be responsible for the sentence of a Ukrainian national. Denys Iarmak, 32, was sentenced to five years in prison for working as a penetration tester for the FIN7 company as was recently announced by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).

The FIN7 aka Carbanak is active since 2013, and it is a stealthy group that specializes in stealing financial data from:-

• Corporations
• Banks

While FIN7 has conducted its attacks against these sectors through:-

• Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams
• Attacks against point-of-sale (PoS) systems
• Supply chain compromise

Prime Targets of FIN7

Here below we have mentioned the primary targets of the FIN7 hacking group:-

• Banks
• Retails
• Restaurants
• Hospitality industries
• Financial Institutions

From 2020 onwards, FIN7 has adopted a new approach to its operations, embracing a large game hunting strategy and a new operating approach. In order to be successful, the group constantly evolves its tactics and improves its arsenal.

While in their new approach they have used big ransomware like:-

• REvil
• Own Ransomware as a Service (RaaS)
• Darkside

The operators of the FIN7 hacking group have used the following malware backdoors:-

• Information stealers
• Trojans
• RDP access modules
• Malicious USB drives

Member of FIN7 Hacking Group Arrested

As a high-level hacker, Denys served as a pentester for FIN7, a task referred to as not only cryptographic but also forensic in nature. In November of 2019, Denys was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand as part of a request from United States government authorities.

There are three FIN7 members who have been sentenced to prison in the United States, and among them, Denys Iarmak is the third member of this group. And here below we have mentioned the name of the other two members as well:-

• Fedir Hladyr, a member of the FIN7, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on April 16, 2021.
• Andrii Kolpakov, a FIN7 member was sentenced to 7 years in prison on June 24, 2021.

Activities Conducted

In today’s economy, FIN7 is regarded as one of the biggest threats to the financial sector. Apart from this, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has estimated that the damage caused to US organizations and consumers is at least $1 billion.

From approximately November 2016 until approximately November 2018, Denys Iarmak was involved with FIN7 on a regular basis. 

For coordinating FIN7 malicious activity and managing the numerous network invasions, Denys frequently used JIRA (a project management software) hosted on private virtual servers in different countries.

Here’s what DoJ stated:-

“As one example, Iarmak created a JIRA issue, to which he and other members of the cyber group had access, for a specific victim company, and, on or about March 3, 2017, Iarmak updated that JIRA and uploaded data he had stolen from that company.”

Further, the prosecutors did not disclose how much Denys Iarmak earned, but they did note that his salary was significantly higher than what someone earning a comparable wage in Ukraine would earn.

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