OFAC Sanctions Russian Cyber Group, Associates
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned 17 people and seven entities, including Russia-based Evil Corp, for acting as “malicious cyber-enabled actors,” according to a Dec. 5 press release. Evil Corp is a “cybercriminal” organization responsible for the development of Dridex malware, which infects computers to harvest login credentials from “hundreds” of banks in more than 40 countries, leading to more than $100 million in theft, Treasury said. Evil Corp’s actions have caused “millions of dollars of damage” to U.S. and international financial institutions, including their customers, the press release said.
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Evil Corp specifically targets financial sectors in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and is led by Maksim Yakubets, who OFAC is also sanctioning. Other designations include Igor Turashev, an “administrator” for Yakubets, and Denis Gusev, a senior member of Evil Corp. OFAC also sanctioned six of Gusev’s Russian businesses: Biznes-Stolitsa, OOO; Optima, OOO; Treid-Invest, OOO; TSAO, OOO; Vertikal, OOO; and Yunikom, OOO.
Other sanctioned individuals include a group of “core members” of Evil Corp: Dmitriy Smirnov, Artem Yakubets, Ivan Tuchkov, Andrey Plotnitskiy, Dmitriy Slobodskoy and Kirill Slobodskoy. The final group of designations targets Moscow-based “financial facilitators” for Evil Corp: Aleksei Bashlikov, Ruslan Zamulko, David Guberman, Carlos Alvares, Georgios Manidis, Tatiana Shevchuk, Azamat Safarov and Gulsara Burkhonova.
As part of the announcement, OFAC removed three Lebanon-related entries from its Specially Designated Nationals List: Issam Mohamad Amhaz, Issam Mohamed Amhaz and Isam Amhaz.