3/7/2025–|Last update: 15:15 (Mecca time)
A former employee of Digital Mint – a company that specializes in negotiations with ransom pirates – faces accusations from federal bodies that include collusion with pirates to obtain a percentage of their profits for itself, according to a report presented by the “Tech Spot” website interested in technology.
Digital Mint was established in 2017 to face the continuous ransom attack crisis, by facilitating negotiation with Pirate The ransom is pushed using digital currencies, as well as providing integrated reports for various attacks and what happened in them, and the company’s customer list includes several companies, including startups and other companies within “Fortune 500”, as the report indicates that the company has dealt with more than two thousand ransom cases.
In the report, the current president of the company, Mark Jason Grenz, stressed that the investigation does not include all the employees of the company or even all its activities, but only the employee who has not yet revealed investigations or the company has not revealed his name, stressing that it is an individual case that has not occurred or previously repeated.
This incident sheds light on several crises related to the negotiating sector with the ransom pirates, as ransom viruses usually cause encryption files and computers and make access to them impossible, which prompts institutions and companies to respond to the demands of pirates that sometimes reach tens of millions of dollars.
James Tallanto, CEO of the Cyber Intelligence Services “AftRDRK”, believes in his conversation with the site that negotiators with pirates do not have a catalyst to reduce the value of the ransom, in the end the negotiating company gets a percentage of the amount paid, the greater the greater percentage, which puts them in an unresolved position that benefits from the value of the ransom, whatever it is.
The company “Digital Mint” is one of the companies that have a license to carry out this job and transfer money between several parties, as it represents the professional level that has reached efforts to resist ransom viruses and recover encrypted files, and despite this they are not above suspicions, as several security authorities and insurance companies have warned against dealing with the company, according to the “Tech Spot” report.
This incident represents the second time that the field of negotiations with the pirates of the ransoms underwent a wide investigation, as the “ProPublica” Foundation in 2019 published a report on an American company claiming its ability to restore encrypted files with the ransom virus using its own technology, and it is in fact negotiating with criminals and paying them.
For his part, Alan Lesca, a threat analyst at Recorded Future, believes that payment of the ransom remains a risky endeavor at best, as these funds contribute to developing pirate operations, as well as causing more attacks against the company that paid, because pirates realize that this company is ready to pay.