Angelo Martino, a 41-year-old former ransomware negotiator at the incident response firm DigitalMint, has pleaded guilty to conspiring with the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang to extort five U.S. companies whose data his employer had been hired to protect, the Department of Justice announced on Monday.
Martino, of Land O’Lakes, Florida, is the third and final member of a trio of cybersecurity professionals charged in the scheme; his co-conspirators, Ryan Clifford Goldberg and Kevin Tyler Martin, pleaded guilty in December. Newly unsealed court filings put the total ransom payments across the insider-assisted attacks at more than $75 million, with two of the payments individually exceeding $25 million.
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“Angelo Martino’s clients trusted him to respond to ransomware threats and help thwart and remedy them on behalf of victims,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said in the DOJ’s statement. “Instead, he betrayed them and began launching ransomware attacks himself by assisting cybercriminals and harming victims, his own employer, and the cyber incident response industry itself.”
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