By 
Europol, the European Union's premier law enforcement agency, has announced the arrest of a Romanian national for his role as a ransomware affiliate suspected of hacking high-profile organisations and companies and stealing large volumes of sensitive data.
The 41-year-old unnamed individual was arrested in Romania, by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) following a joint investigation in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
It is not known which ransomware gang the suspect was working with, but the development comes a little over a month after Romanian authorities arrested two affiliates of the REvil ransomware family, who are believed to have organised around 5,000 ransomware attacks and extorted close to $600,000 from victims.
Threat actors are usually recruited by the ransomware operators on underground forums, but affiliates also earn a large share of each successful ransom payment, ranging anywhere between 65 and 90%.
According to Europol, the suspect is said to have targeted a large Romanian IT company delivering services to clients in the retail, energy and utilities sectors.
Subsequently, the affiliate deployed ransomware and collected troves of data from the company's customers located in the country and beyond, before proceeding to encrypting the files.
The stolen data included the companies' financial information, personal information about employees, customers' details and other important documents.
In a separate law enforcement action, the Cyberpolice Department of the National Police of Ukraine announced the arrest of 51 people in connection with illegally possessing about 100 databases containing personal information of more than 300 million citizens of Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S.
The databases also included "confidential information on financial and economic activities of individuals and legal entities, information about customers of banking and commercial institutions, authorisation data on emails, social networks, online stores and more
As part of the operation named "DATA," the officials conducted a total of 117 searchers in various parts of the country and shut down an unnamed website that offered the stolen data for sale.
