Security

FBI most-wanted Russian hacker reveals why he burned his passport

Comment

The FBI's wanted poster for Mikhail Matveev.
Image Credits: FBI/Department of Justice

Russian hacker Mikhail Matveev, also known on the internet as “Wazawaka” and “Boriselcin,” is wanted by the FBI, which is offering a $10 million reward for information that could lead to his arrest, and has been put on a U.S. sanctions list. But, according to Matveev, his life hasn’t changed much since he was outed as an alleged cybercriminal and put on the FBI’s most wanted list.

“We are Russian people, we are not afraid of the American government,” Matveev told TechCrunch in an online interview. “My life has changed for the better after the sanctions, I don’t feel them on me, as well as sanctions are a plus for my security, so sanctions help us.”

In an interview where he answered both in English and in Russian, Matveev said that being sanctioned means Russia will not deport him. And to avoid getting caught outside of Russia, he won’t travel anymore, and said he has “burned” his passport. His last trip, he said, was to Thailand in 2014, where he ate scorpion, which he said was “delicious.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. government accused Matveev of participating in “a global ransomware campaign” against victims all over the world. Prosecutors claim Matveev is “a prolific ransomware affiliate,” who worked with the Hive, LockBit and Babuk ransomware gangs to carry out “significant attacks” against corporations and critical infrastructure in the U.S. and elsewhere, including hospitals and government agencies. In particular, the feds said Matveev “allegedly intentionally infected” the computers of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department with ransomware.

Matveev, however, said he actually isn’t affiliated with any ransomware group and that he only “rented their software for my own purposes.” Since the indictment and sanctions, he said, he has joked about the measures taken against him with people still involved in ransomware operations.

“We sometimes throw memes at each other,” he said.

He said he was using the ransomware to both test it in a controlled environment and to deploy it in real-life scenarios.

“I have never been the author of the Hive and Lockbit project, I was only an affiliated independent person — by myself, my own master,” Matveev said, adding that he is not interested in ransomware anymore.

Since he was indicted and sanctioned, Matveev has kept a prolific life on X, formerly Twitter, given interviews to cybersecurity publications and trolled the U.S. government by printing a T-shirt featuring his own FBI most wanted poster and asking his followers if they’d like to buy similar merch.

An unnamed FBI spokesperson said the bureau declined to comment.

We verified that Matveev was really the person behind the X account by asking him for selfies. Matveev provided a selfie showing his left hand, which has only four fingers, per Matveev’s FBI’s most wanted page, as well as a selfie holding a piece of paper that had this reporter’s name handwritten on it. Matveev said he lost his finger in 2017 when he was installing a server cabinet that weighed 35 kg (around 77 lbs), which forced him to get surgery.

The alleged hacker declined to say how much money he has made with his ransomware work, and said he now invests in crypto, and recommended everyone do the same. Matveev said he is also working on a website about cybersecurity. Although he declined to say how much money he’s made with his ransomware activities, he denied that the income the FBI is attributing to him and his accomplices — $200 million in ransomware payments — is real.

Matveev added that he is not interested in ransomware anymore. But asked if he misses hacking, he said “very much :(” and he also said he may go back to hacking “but no one will know about it.”


Do you have more information about any ransomware gang? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram, Keybase and Wire @lorenzofb, or email lorenzo@techcrunch.com. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.

Do government sanctions against ransomware groups work?

More TechCrunch

Ahead of the AI safety summit kicking off in Seoul, South Korea later this week, its co-host the United Kingdom is expanding its own efforts in the field. The AI…

UK opens office in San Francisco to tackle AI risk

Companies are always looking for an edge, and searching for ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do that is by running an internal hackathon around a…

Why companies are turning to internal hackathons

Featured Article

I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Women in tech still face a shocking level of mistreatment at work. Melinda French Gates is one of the few working to change that.

8 hours ago
I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s  broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Blue Origin has successfully completed its NS-25 mission, resuming crewed flights for the first time in nearly two years. The mission brought six tourist crew members to the edge of…

Blue Origin successfully launches its first crewed mission since 2022

Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top entertainment and sports talent agencies, is hoping to be at the forefront of AI protection services for celebrities in Hollywood. With many…

Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which…

OpenAI and Google lay out their competing AI visions

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

2 days ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

2 days ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities