Four Russian nationals, who were suspected of deploying a variant of Phobos ransomware to extort payments from people in Europe and beyond, were arrested last week, the pan-European police agency Europol said on Tuesday.

An international law-enforcement collaboration has taken down two Russian nationals and two unidentified women who ran ransomware affiliate platforms in Thailand.

A complex international operation involving 14 coordinated law enforcement agencies led to the arrest of four Russian nationals behind the 8Base ransomware group. View on euronews

Base used a variant of the Phobos ransomware strain to hit numerous companies. The suspects, all Russian nationals, were found in Thailand.

Law enforcement has seized the dark web leak site of 8Base, a prominent ransomware group, and arrested four alleged members of the related Phobos operation in Thailand.

The U.S. Justice Department announced the names of two Phobos ransomware affiliates arrested yesterday in Thailand, charging them on 11 counts due to their involvement in more than a thousand cyberattacks.

The crackdown follows a series of important arrests targeting Phobos ransomware. Those arrests allowed law enforcement to warn more than 400 companies worldwide of ongoing or imminent ransomware attacks. In June 2024, an administrator of Phobos was arrested in South Korea and extradited to the United States in November.

The Russian nationals are accused of launching more than 1,000 ransomware attacks worldwide to steal $16 million