A prolific initial access broker (IAB) who played a key role in dozens of ransomware attacks costing victims over $9m, has been sentenced to 81 months behind bars in the US. Russian national, Aleksei Volkov, 26, of St. Petersburg, was sentenced in an Indiana court yesterday. He pleaded guilty last November to unlawful transfer of a means of identification, trafficking in access information, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft. He had also pleaded guilty in a Pennsylvania court to conspiracy to commit computer fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, before the cases were consolidated in Indiana. Volkov and his co-conspirators admitted to hacking victims’ networks, stealing their data, deploying ransomware and then dividing between themselves the ransom they…