Germany Identifies UNKN — Head of REvil and GandCrab Ransomware Groups — as Daniil Shchukin
German federal police (BKA) have publicly identified 31 year old Russian national Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin as UNKN, the operator behind both the GandCrab an…
Published on MyPrivateClaw
Apr 8, 2026, 8:46 AM UTC
Coverage date
Apr 7, 2026
Last updated
Apr 8, 2026, 8:46 AM UTC
News summary
The German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) has publicly identified the person behind the alias UNKN (also known as UNKNOWN) — the operator who ran both the GandCrab and REvil ransomware as a service (RaaS) programs — as Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin , a 31 year old Russian national from Krasnodar. Who Is UNKN UNKNOWN was the public facing operator of two of the most consequential ransomware programs of the 2018–2021 period: GandCrab (2018–2019): One of the first large scale RaaS programs, GandCrab paid affiliates large revenue shares to deploy the ransomware against corporate targets. The group claimed to have extorted more than $2 billion before announcing retirement in May 2019 REvil (2019–2021): Widely understood to be a reorganisation of GandCrab under a new name, REvil evolved into a "big game hunting" operation targeting organisations with revenues above $100…