Russia has free four members of a notorious hacking gang, despite sentencing them to five years in prison on Monday.
The Verge, citing the Russian state-owned news agency TASS, reported that four members of the REvil ransomware gang were released from custody in Russia, despite pleading guilty to fraud and malware distribution charges.
It was back in January 2022 (before the Ukraine invasion) that Russia’s FSB had raided 25 addresses and arrested a total of 14 individuals in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Leningrad and Lipetsk.
Hackers freed
At the time, Russian authorities seized more than 426 million roubles (£4m), including cryptocurrency, about £860,000 in euros and US dollars, computer equipment and 20 luxury cars.
The gang was believed to have been responsible for high profile and damaging cyberattacks against the likes of Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods and US technology firm Kaseya.
The 2022 arrests made by Russian authorities came after the US government had warned that it would take its own action against Russian ransomware groups if the Kremlin failed to do so, the Verge noted.
And now it reported that the Dzerzhinsky Court of St. Petersburg has allowed Roman Muromsky, Andrei Bessonov, Mikhail Golovachuk, and Dmitry Korotaev to walk free after sentencing them to five years in prison on Monday.
The court apparently ruled that the gang members had spent enough time in a Russian detention centre while awaiting trial.
Muromsky, Bessonov, Golovachuk, and Korotaev had reportedly confirmed they were involved in REvil activities between October 2015 and January 2022, and primarily targeted US citizens.
According to the Verge, their attacks included “carding,” which is a form of fraud and laundering that involves using stolen credit card information to buy prepaid gift cards.
REvil shutdown
The REvil gang had shut down its operations in July 2021, before staging a failed comeback a few months later.
Then its information infrastructure was hacked and forced offline by an international operation in October 2021.
In November 2021 Romanian police had arrested two REvil hackers as part of the ongoing campaign to take down the ransomware gang.
