cyber chronicle, 28.10.2024, 11:30 AM
Four members now disbanded ransomware groups REvil they were sentenced to several years in prison in Russia, which is one of the few cases in which cybercriminals in this country have been convicted of hacking and money laundering.
As reported by the Russian Merchantthe Garrison Military Court in St. Petersburg found Artem Zaec, Aleksei Malozemov, Danilo Puzirevskii and Ruslan Hansvyarov guilty of “illegal circulation of means of payment” on Friday, October 25. Puzirevski and Hansvjarov were also found guilty of using and distributing malware. Zaec and Malozemov were sentenced to four and a half and five years in prison, and Hansvjarov and Puzirevski to five and a half and six years in prison. The investigation linked them to the Revil ransomware group, and their activities became known from a complaint by US law enforcement agencies that reported the group’s leader for involvement in attacks on IT resources of foreign companies.
The four of them are part of a group of 14 people who were previously detained in connection with this case. As TASS reported back in January 2022, eight of them were indicted for their criminal activities.
The remaining four members, Andrej Besonov, Mihail Golovachuk, Roman Muromski and Dmitry Korotaev, are being prosecuted under a new criminal procedure related to unauthorized access to computer information, Kommersant reported. All the accused have been in custody since the beginning of 2022, but none of them have admitted their guilt.
REvil, once one of the most successful ransomware groups, was disbanded after Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced the arrests of several members. Arrests of members of REville, which the Western media call “pro-Russian cybercriminals”, took place in several regions of Russia in June 2021. A few days before that, during a telephone conversation between the presidents of Russia and the USA, Joe Biden asked Vladimir Putin to stop the activities of ransomware groups.
Earlier this year, a 24-year-old Ukrainian national named Jaroslav Vasinsky was sentenced in the US to 13 years in prison and ordered to pay $16 million in restitution for more than 2,500 REvil ransomware attacks and more than $700 million in ransom demands dollars.
The sentencing of REvil members in Russia also comes a month after authorities in the country opened an investigation into Cryptex and UAPS, which were sanctioned by the US for offering money laundering services to cybercriminals.
Photo: Christian Lue | Unsplash
Source: www.informacija.rs
