Last Thursday, French Justice released two hackers Spaniards aged 26 and 28 arrested last summer on charges of attacking 26 French companies from which they supposedly demanded million-dollar ransoms. After the investigation and the oral hearing, it was discovered that the investigation had no credibility.
The Prosecutor’s Office had requested imprisonment for the two arrested men, to whom the French Police attributed the largest number of attacks carried out so far on servers in France. It was in July 2023 when an attack on multiple logistics and transportation companies was reported with losses estimated at over three million euros. An operation that was not unique, but the tip of the iceberg of the modus operandi of an alleged criminal organization that used the ransomware dusta kind of malware which is used to encrypt files and demand a ransom in cryptocurrency.
The French Police located the two suspects hackers Spaniards and alerted Interpol. In Madrid they were arrested and placed at the disposal of the National audience, which released them and summoned them for the hearing last Thursday in Paris. Those arrested were accused of leading an organization that entered company systems using social engineering techniques, phishing emails or exploiting vulnerabilities.
Once running on the victim’s system, Babuk would search and encrypt files using cryptographic algorithms. Later, he showed a ransom note. The operation led to servers located in Russia, where the trace was lost, except in the branch that supposedly linked the collection of cryptocurrencies, which pointed to Spanish citizens. In collaboration with the French lawyer Olivier Arnodthe defense carried out by Ospina Lawyers He went to France to make a voluntary declaration before the Paris Court.
The event was closed months ago, when the lawyer who is an expert in computer crimes Juan Gonzalo Ospina He managed to get the French authorities to withdraw the Euroorder against his clients, agreeing that this voluntary appearance would take place on the dates indicated by the court. At the hearing, the French prosecutor’s office requested unconditional imprisonment without bail for the hackers, but the defense questioned the police report, accusing it of conjecturing rather than proving. “They are accused of more than 200 attacks, but there are no more than five victims,” Ospina said in his oral report. The case became complicated for the Spanish after a recess where the judge agreed to prison. However, in France there is a court independent of the investigator, the guarantee judge, who can assess freedom in criminal cases.