The suspect’s name, Moses Luis Zagala Gonzalez, used the pseudonyms Noosophoros, Aesculapius, and Nebuchadnezzar. Not only did he hire one of his programs, he also offered support and training to cybercriminals, and then shared the profits with them – ransoms received from victims around the world.

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US Attorney General Breon Pease said Gonzalez was working with hackers linked to the Iranian government.

• The Jigsaw encoder has been inactive since the fall of 2021, and before that its effectiveness was quite low. Additionally, there is a free decoder created by Emsisoft experts.
• Thanos, in turn, worked on the Ransomware as a Service model and advertised on Russian hacking forums.
• The malware allowed you to create your own programs with the help of a special designer.
• Bleeping Computer states that the creator of the virus not only runs an affiliate program where cybercriminals share the proceeds of attacks with it, but also licenses Thanos using a North Carolina-based license server.
• Thanos’ activity nearly stopped in February 2022, and his code appeared on VirusTotal in June 2021.

Gonzalez was finally linked to the Thanos attacks only in May 2022, when one of his relatives was questioned, who received a portion of the illegal proceeds using PayPal. The informant also gave the investigators contact information stored on his phone, which Noosophoros used to record some of the Thanos infrastructure.

If found guilty, he faces up to five years in prison for attempting to hack into computer networks and up to five years in prison for trying to sneak into computer networks.