CoinVault Authors Sentenced to Community Service

The two brothers responsible for the CoinVault ransomware were sentenced today to 240 hours of community service, the Dutch court announced.

It has been nearly three years since the pair was arrested for CoinVault, which began targeting victims in 2014 by encrypting data on machines and demanding cryptocurrency ransom. It briefly stopped in November 2014, when a sample was detected by Kaspersky Lab, but then resumed in April 2015, when a new sample was discovered.

In the time it was active, CoinVault spread to more than 14,000 Windows machines in 20 countries, primarily the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Germany, and France. The brothers behind the attack were accused of breaking into computers, making other people's work inaccessible, and extorting 1,295 people. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab believe more users were infected because they recorded at least 14,000 keys when they released their final decryption tool.

Read more about the trial here.

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