U.S. Sanctions First VPN Service and Malware Cryptor Seller Over Ransomware Support

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two individuals and a VPN service provider for enabling ransomware actors' and other cybercriminals' malicious activities, including ransomware attacks against Americans.

The VPN, named First VPN Service (1VPNS), has been accused of offering its tools to ransomware groups, along with its 45-year-old Ukrainian administrator, Dmytro Rashevskyi. The department has also sanctioned Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev, a Belarusian national, for selling cryptors to help conceal ransomware and other malware as safe programs to avoid being detected by security tools.

First VPN was dismantled in May 2026 as part of a joint law enforcement operation by European and North American authorities for assisting criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks. The service had been operational since 2014, advertising that it neither keeps a log of users' identities or activities nor cooperates with law enforcement to tackle illegal activity originating from servers it rents to customers.

Per the Treasury, several ransomware groups are said to have purchased First VPN to carry out attacks on U.S. companies and institutions and hide their true origins, deploy malware, and manage exfiltrated data. Victims of ransomware attacks that involved the VPN infrastructure included U.S. businesses, financial services companies, hospitals, and municipal governments.

Ransomware groups using services supplied by the designated parties allegedly caused billions of dollars in losses to American businesses and critical infrastructure providers, U.S. officials said.

"Rashevskyi has used false identities, including 'Maksim Sorin' and 'Roman Chabanenko,' to buy infrastructure from companies that might otherwise refuse to do business with him because of complaints of abuse from internet service providers about illegal activity originating from 1VPNS servers," the department said.

U.K. and E.U. Impose Sanctions on Russian Individuals and Entities

The disclosure coincides with the U.K. and E.U. sanctioning Russian cyber networks for their "persistent and increasingly reckless attempts to sow chaos and division across Europe." The sanctions target 24 individuals and entities behind destructive cyber and hybrid operations, including operators involved in proxy networks linked to the Russian Intelligence Services (RIS).

This includes Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) senior leadership members Vyacheslav Stafeyev, Ivan Senin, and Ivan Kasyanenko for their role in directing GRU cyber and hybrid threat operations. In tandem, Centre 16 of the Federal Security Service (FSB) has been attributed to disruptive sabotage operations against Poland's energy grid late last year.

"GRU Unit 29155 cyber division worked with cybercriminals, including the company IMPULS, to recruit hackers and cyber specialists from universities and academies across Russia," the U.K. government said.

The sanctions are also aimed at individuals behind Lumma Stealer for enabling cybercriminals to collect sensitive information from compromised devices at scale. Russia is said to have used the stealer's stolen credentials to conduct cyber espionage operations against targets globally to support the Kremlin's objectives.

"Cybercriminals, self-proclaimed hacktivists and private companies linked to Russia, including actors operating under its instructions, direction or control, have also carried out, enabled and facilitated a wide range of malicious activities," the E.U. said.

"We strongly condemn Russia's behaviour and misuse of this cyber ecosystem, targeting public services and critical infrastructure, causing disruptions and financial losses. By calling out Russia's malicious behaviour and imposing costs on those responsible for such activities, the EU underscores its determination to uphold accountability in cyberspace."

Russian State-Sponsored Targeting Goes After Routers

The sanctions also arrive against the backdrop of a new advisory issued by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about FSB Center 16 cyber actors' exploitation of poorly configured and vulnerable networking devices across the world to opportunistically hack into multiple critical infrastructure sector networks.

"The Russian FSB Center 16 cyber actors primarily use scanning to identify poorly configured networking devices, primarily routers, for exploitation," the agency said. "The actors scan for Internet IP ranges with active Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents that accept common or default community strings for authentication."

These scans, which are run via proxies, consist of SNMP Set-Requests from a spoofed IP address containing Object Identifiers (OIDs) that instruct the SNMP agent on poorly configured networking devices to copy its configuration to a file and transfer it to an attacker-controlled virtual private server (VPS) or compromised FTP server.

The activity also involves abusing common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) in Cisco devices, such as CVE-2018-0171 and CVE-2008-4128, as a way to discover and exploit poorly configured networking appliances. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has since added CVE-2008-4128 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring federal agencies to apply the fixes by July 16, 2026.

The threat actors behind the campaign are tracked under various names, including Berserk Bear, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Energetic Bear, Ghost Blizzard, Energetic Bear, and Static Tundra. In August 2025, Cisco warned of active exploitation of CVE-2018-0171, urging customers to apply the necessary fixes as soon as possible.

"This is an ongoing issue that has impacted various U.S. and foreign networks across multiple sectors, including the Defense Industrial Base, communications, energy, financial services, government facilities, and healthcare sectors," the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) said.

Update

Chainalysis, in a report published Tuesday, said the E.U. sanctions also target Vitaly Nikolayevich Kovalev (also spelled Vitalii Nikolaevich Kovalev), aka Stern, who is administrator of the TrickBot cybercrime group and has received no less than $300 million in ransom payments. Stern's designation brings the total TrickBot members sanctioned to 19. Kovalev was added to the E.U. Most Wanted list in May 2025.

"Although wallets associated with Stern have received over $300 million in ransom payments, this figure represents only his personal cut of the proceeds," the blockchain analytics firm said. "Stern transacted with numerous ransomware strains, including Ryuk, Conti, Diavol, Karakurt, Royal, 3am, Quantum, and Bitpaymer."

In a follow-up analysis, Picus Security also detailed the FSB Center 16's reliance on weak SNMP and vulnerabilities in Cisco Smart Install (CVE-2018-0171) to compromise poorly configured routers and spy on critical infrastructure.

"They scan the internet for SNMP agents accepting default/weak community strings, then issue SNMP Set-Requests abusing the Cisco CISCO-CONFIG-COPY-MIB to copy device configs to attacker infrastructure via TFTP," it said. "Because SNMP runs over UDP, which is connectionless and stateless, spoofing works easily: it bypasses ACLs and hides the true origin, so logs can make the activity look like it came from an internal or local IP."

To counter the threat, it's advised to keep systems up-to-date, disable Cisco Smart Install, turn off SNMPv1 and v2c, move to SNMPv3 at authPriv level, use separate passwords for authentication and encryption, harden local credentials, and restrict management access.

(The story was updated after publication to include additional insights from Chainalysis and Picus Security.)

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