An Armenian man was sentenced to 24 months in prison and 3 years of supervised release for hacking U.S. companies and encrypting their systems in Ryuk ransomware attacks.
35-year-old Karen Serobovich Vardanyan (also known online as "Maneeken" or "Karl Lagerfeld"), who specialized in gaining initial access to corporate networks, pleaded guilty in July after being extradited from Kyiv, Ukraine, following his April 2025 arrest.
According to court documents, Vardanyan hacked into the networks of multiple U.S. organizations in Ryuk ransomware attacks between March 2019 and approximately June 2020.
In one of these attacks, Vardanyan and his accomplices breached a Michigan company that paid 200 BTC (worth over $1.1 million at the time). Prosecutors also said the cybercriminals breached a school in Texas and a technology company in Wilsonville, Oregon.
"Vardanyan and his co-conspirators illegally accessed computer networks of victim companies and deployed ransomware on hundreds of compromised servers and workstations," the U.S. Department of Justice said in July.