Russian court releases several REvil ransomware gang members
Four members of the notorious cybercriminal group REvil were found guilty of financial fraud and computer crimes targeting primarily American victims, but were released after a Russian court determined their sentence would amount to time already served.
The four men — Andrey Bessonov, Mikhail Golovachuk, Roman Muromsky, and Dmitry Korotayev — all admitted guilt and have been held in pretrial detention since their early 2022 arrests. The court also ordered the confiscation of luxury vehicles and cash totaling hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars.
The conviction and subsequent release, reported first by the Russian news outlet TASS, follows separate sentences given in October 2024 to other members of the cybercrime group — Daniil Puzyrevsky, Ruslan Khansvyarov, Aleksey Malozemov, and Artem Zayets — which ranged from four-and-a-half to six years.
The criminal proceedings against REvil stretch back to January 2022, when Russian authorities, acting on information from the United States, arrested 14 people suspected of running and developing the gang’s operations. The case was considered at the time to be a rare example of Russian–U.S. joint action against cybercrime, especially given Russia’s traditional reluctance to prosecute alleged hackers domestically.
However, cooperation between Washington and Moscow later stalled amid heightened tensions over Russia’s war with Ukraine. As a result, charges relating to computer intrusions and attacks on foreign companies did not progress further in Russian courts, with prosecutions in Russia largely focused on illegal use of bank card data.
The wider REvil network was once one of the world’s most prolific ransomware syndicates. The group carried out high-profile attacks on global targets, and played a principal role in the 2021 ransomware incident involving Florida-based IT firm Kaseya. In May 2024, a U.S. court sentenced Ukrainian national Yaroslav Vasinsky, a REvil affiliate, to 13 years in prison and imposed fines totaling $16 million. Another alleged member, Yevgeniy Polyanin, remains wanted by U.S. authorities on charges linked to more than 3,000 cyberattacks and extortion attempts.
