$10m reward for info on folks involved in Redline Stealer

In October of 2022, I blogged about how Redline was the next big threat. Since then, several different people were arrested, and they’re still looking for more at the Department of Justice.

Two years later in 2024, we blogged at the fact that this service was taken down.

I believe that Red Line has also been talked about in podcasts throughout the years both on TSB and possibly my main program.

The U.S. Department of State has announced a reward of up to $10 million for any information on government-sponsored hackers with ties to the RedLine infostealer malware operation and its suspected creator, Russian national Maxim Alexandrovich Rudometov.

The same bounty covers leads on state hackers’ use of this malware in cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the United States.

This bounty is posted as part of the Department of State’s Rewards for Justice program established by the 1984 Act to Combat International Terrorism, which rewards informants for tips that help identify or locate foreign government threat actors behind cyberattacks against U.S. entities.

The article further down says:

Since its inception, over $250 million has been paid through this program to more than 125 individuals who provided leads that helped protect U.S. national security.

Several other paragraphs go in to details on who they’re looking for now. Let’s make it clear that they don’t know if this person has been arrested already.

?Maxim Alexandrovich Rudometov, the suspected developer and administrator of the RedLine infostealer malware operation, was charged in October in the United States following a joint international law enforcement action codenamed ‘Operation Magnus.’

“Rudometov regularly accessed and managed the infrastructure of RedLine Infostealer, was associated with various cryptocurrency accounts used to receive and launder payments, and was in possession of RedLine malware,” the Justice Department said at the time.

The Dutch police, working with international partners, disrupted the RedLine and META malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platforms linked to the theft of millions of account credentials. Law enforcement also disrupted their sales channels by seizing RedLine and META Telegram accounts used to promote malware to buyers.

Additionally, Eurojust and the Dutch police revealed that the authorities arrested two suspects in Belgium and seized three servers and two web domains used for command and control operations by the two malware platforms.

It’s unclear if Rudometov was also arrested, but he could face up to 35 years in prison if convicted on counts of access device fraud, conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and money laundering.

Eset, the antivirus company was also involved by mapping out a network that included at least 1200 servers and several domains.

US offers $10M for tips on state hackers tied to RedLine malware is the article if you want to read it. We we quoted here is only some of it.