ESET "Killing me gently" — a de-facto mid-year RaaS-tooling report

Background. The Gentlemen emerged in late 2025 as a RaaS operation founded by "hastalamuerte" (a former Qilin affiliate per Group-IB, previously affiliated with Embargo, LockBit, Medusa and BlackLock per PRODAFT). ESET first hypothesised an in-house EDR-killer in February 2026; Group-IB and Check Point independently corroborated before the gang's own internal data leaked. By April 2026 the group accounted for ~10% of global ransomware activity, and Krebs (06-10) linked the alias to a named individual in Izhevsk, Russia.

ESET's 06-26 deep-dive into the leaked internal data is the most substantive published-in-window documentation of RaaS tooling structure, and reads as a mid-year complement to the W25 Check Point State of Ransomware Q1 2026. Three structural findings a detection engineer should register: (1) GentleKiller is a modular in-house framework with at least eight BYOVD variants, each impersonating a different vendor and abusing a different kernel driver — driver allow-listing alone is insufficient without process-injection-chain detection; (2) the group integrates rival gangs' EDR killers (HexKiller from Warlock, ThrottleBlood shared with MedusaLocker/DragonForce, HavocKiller), so tooling overlap no longer implies operational overlap; (3) victims are selected centrally on FortiGate misconfiguration rather than geography, tying the Gentlemen victim pipeline directly to FortiBleed-style reconnaissance (§ 8). New BYOVD PoCs are operationalised within days of public release. (daily 06-27)