bleepingcomputer.com
By Sergiu Gatlan
December 30, 2025
Two former employees of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint have pleaded guilty to targeting U.S. companies in BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware attacks in 2023.
Two former employees of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint have pleaded guilty to targeting U.S. companies in BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware attacks in 2023.
33-year-old Ryan Clifford Goldberg of Watkinsville, Georgia (in federal custody since September 2023), and 28-year-old Kevin Tyler Martin of Roanoke, Texas, who were charged in November, have now pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct commerce by extortion and are set to be sentenced on March 12, 2026, facing up to 20 years in prison each.
Together with a third accomplice, the two BlackCat ransomware affiliates breached the networks of multiple victims across the United States between May 2023 and November 2023, paying a 20% share of ransoms in exchange for access to BlackCat's ransomware and extortion platform.
Goldberg is a former Sygnia incident response manager, and Martin worked at DigitalMint as a ransomware threat negotiator (just as the unnamed co-conspirator).
"These defendants used their sophisticated cybersecurity training and experience to commit ransomware attacks — the very type of crime that they should have been working to stop," said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva. "Extortion via the internet victimizes innocent citizens every bit as much as taking money directly out of their pockets."
According to court documents, their alleged victims include a Maryland pharmaceutical company, a California engineering firm, a Tampa medical device manufacturer, a Virginia drone manufacturer, and a California doctor's office.
While they have demanded ransoms ranging from $300,000 to $10 million, prosecutors said they were only paid $1.27 million by the Tampa medical device company after encrypting its servers and demanding $10 million in May 2023. While other victims also received ransom demands, the indictment does not indicate whether additional payments were made.
As BleepingComputer previously reported, the Justice Department was also investigating a former DigitalMint negotiator in July for allegedly working with ransomware groups. However, the DOJ and FBI did not comment on the investigation, and it is unclear if this case is related to it.
In December 2023, the FBI created a decryption tool after breaching BlackCat's servers to monitor their activities and obtain decryption keys. The FBI also found that the BlackCat operation collected at least $300 million in ransom payments from more than 1,000 victims until September 2023.
In a February 2024 joint advisory, the FBI, CISA, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also warned that Blackcat affiliates were primarily targeting organizations in the U.S. healthcare sector.
On May 7, 2025, the LockBit admin panel was hacked by an anonymous actor who replaced their TOR website with the text ‘Don’t do crime CRIME IS BAD xoxo from Prague’ and shared a SQL dump of their admin panel database in an archived file ‘paneldb_dump.zip’:
There is not much information available regarding the individual identified as 'xoxo from Prague' whose objective seems to be the apprehension of malicious ransomware threat actors. It is uncommon for a major ransomware organization's website to be defaced; more so for its administrative panel to be compromised. This leaked SQL database dump is significant as it offers insight into the operational methods of LockBit affiliates and the negotiation tactics they employ to secure ransom payments from their victims.
Trellix Advanced Research Center’s investigations into the leaked SQL database confirmed with high confidence that the database originates from LockBit's affiliates admin panel. This panel allows the generation of ransomware builds for victims, utilizing LockBit Black 4.0 and LockBit Green 4.0, compatible with Linux, Windows and ESXi systems, and provides access to victim negotiation chats.
The leaked SQL database dump encompasses data from December 18, 2024 to April 29, 2025, including details pertaining to LockBit adverts (aka ransomware affiliates), victim organizations, chat logs, cryptocurrency wallets and ransomware build configurations.
The LockBit ransomware gang has suffered a data breach after its dark web affiliate panels were defaced and replaced with a message linking to a MySQL database dump.
All of the ransomware gang's admin panels now state. "Don't do crime CRIME IS BAD xoxo from Prague," with a link to download a "paneldb_dump.zip."
LockBit dark web site defaced with link to database
As first spotted by the threat actor, Rey, this archive contains a SQL file dumped from the site affiliate panel's MySQL database.
From analysis by BleepingComputer, this database contains twenty tables, with some more interesting than others, including:
A 'btc_addresses' table that contains 59,975 unique bitcoin addresses.
A 'builds' table contains the individual builds created by affiliates for attacks. Table rows contain the public keys, but no private keys, unfortunately. The targeted companies' names are also listed for some of the builds.
A 'builds_configurations' table contains the different configurations used for each build, such as which ESXi servers to skip or files to encrypt.
A 'chats' table is very interesting as it contains 4,442 negotiation messages between the ransomware operation and victims from December 19th to April 29th.
Affiliate panel 'chats' table
Affiliate panel 'chats' table
A 'users' table lists 75 admins and affiliates who had access to the affiliate panel, with Michael Gillespie spotting that passwords were stored in plaintext. Examples of some of the plaintext passwords are 'Weekendlover69, 'MovingBricks69420', and 'Lockbitproud231'.
In a Tox conversation with Rey, the LockBit operator known as 'LockBitSupp' confirmed the breach, stating that no private keys were leaked or data lost.
Based on the MySQL dump generation time and the last date record in the negotiation chats table , the database appears to have been dumped at some point on April 29th, 2025.
It's unclear who carried out the breach and how it was done, but the defacement message matches the one used in a recent breach of Everest ransomware's dark web site, suggesting a possible link.
Russian national Ruslan Magomedovich Astamirov was arrested in Arizona and charged by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly deploying LockBit ransomware on the networks of victims in the United States and abroad.
