Two U.S.-based cybersecurity professionals have pleaded guilty to their role in ransomware attacks linked to the notorious ALPHV, also known as BlackCat.
A federal court in Florida accepted the guilty pleas of Ryan Goldberg and Kevin Martin for conspiring to extort victims through ransomware attacks carried out in 2023.
Court documents reveal the men abused their cybersecurity skills to deploy BlackCat ransomware against multiple U.S. victims between April and December 2023. Operating as affiliates, they paid 20% of each ransom to the ransomware group’s administrators and kept the remaining share. In one confirmed attack, they extorted around $1.2 million in Bitcoin and later laundered the funds.
BlackCat operated as a ransomware-as-a-service platform, targeting over 1,000 victims worldwide. The Justice Department previously disrupted the group in late 2023 after the FBI developed a decryption tool that helped victims recover systems and avoid nearly $99 million in ransom payments.
Goldberg and Martin now face up to 20 years in prison each, with sentencing scheduled for March 12, 2026. U.S. officials warned that ransomware threats can originate domestically and urged organizations to report attacks quickly and vet third-party incident responders carefully.
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