A former employee of the Israeli cybersecurity company Sygnia pleaded guilty to federal offences in the US for being involved in ransomware attacks in an attempt to extort millions of dollars from companies around the US.
Ryan Clifford Goldberg, who served as a cyber incident response supervisor at the company, admitted he was part of a years-long scheme targeting businesses across America.
Kevin Tyler Martin, a former DigitalMint employee who served as a negotiation intermediary with hackers, a role intended to help ransomware victims, also admitted involvement.
Both pled guilty to extortion charges
According to federal court records, both pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to interfere with commerce through extortion. In their plea documents, they admitted that together with a third individual, who was not charged and is not named, they carried out business intrusions and ransom demands over several years.
In one case, they successfully extracted more than $1 million in cryptocurrency from a medical equipment company in Florida.
According to the indictment, alongside their legitimate work, they used software known as ALPHV BlackCat to steal and encrypt victims’ data, and shared the extortion proceeds with the software’s developers.
DigitalMint said two of the people who were accused were former employees, but both were let go and “acted wholly outside the scope of their employment and without any authorization, knowledge or involvement from the company,” in an emailed statement to Bloomberg.
Sygnia previously told Bloomberg that the Israel-based company was not a target of the investigation and that Goldberg was let go as soon as the matter became known.
A company spokesperson declined to provide further comment, and attorneys for Goldberg and Martin also declined to comment on the report.
Jerusalem Post staff contributed to this report