On the wall, behind the three magistrates of the 13th criminal chamber of the Paris judicial court, a long series of messages scroll on the screen, Tuesday, November 26. “Let’s put a fucking crypto block on that shit.”said one of them, in English (“let’s deploy ransomware on this shit”). “You say “let’s do it.” [“allons-y”]“perhaps this is where the trial judge considered you to be an accomplice.”laughs the president of the court, Guillaume Daieff.
The two correspondents of these messages are the cybercriminal who manages the Everest ransomware, one of those malicious programs that encrypt your data to demand a ransom, as well as an Internet user who uses the pseudonym Theeeel. If we don’t know where the first is, the second, with his hair tied in a ponytail, has been facing his judges since the day before. Florent Curtet, a thirty-year-old French talk show regular, is on trial for a series of crimes related to computer hacking and extortion.
“Not contextualized, cold”, “obviously” that these messages are “overwhelming”recognizes the lawyer of one of the civil parties, Hervé Banbanaste. But he was not an accomplice, says the accused. It was a strategy to better infiltrate the dangerous group of hackers by the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI), the internal intelligence service. I even had “a protocol”certainly “amateur”. At the beginning of the trial, former police officer Pierre Penalba, previously stationed in Nice, came to his aid. “I explained to the DGSI what he had done for us and requested his hiring.”He explained on the stand about his former unofficial cyber informant.
“I ended up lying”
It is within the framework of this supposed collaboration with the “services” that Florent Curtet claims to have exchanged with the Everest gang about the ransomware attack suffered by the Le Bonnois law firm in 2021. After he believed he was corresponding with the victim.
Except he was actually talking to a police officer under a pseudonym. Which, according to the defense, will push Florent Curtet to intervene in the negotiation. One thing led to another and the young man agreed to travel to Moscow to recover a hard drive containing data stolen by cybercriminals. “What was the point of recovering data from a physical hard drive? “, asks the president of the court. The interested party admits: this recovery did not provide a guarantee of deletion of the data by the group. But when I went to meet him, “I was almost sure I could locate Everest to dismantle them”supports Florent Curtet.
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