Earlier this year remote management solutions provider Kaseya was hit by the REvil ransomware that has been plaguing companies and the internet at large for months.
The REvil group claimed it had been responsible for that attack and this week the US Department of Justice announced it charged two individuals with conducting ransomware attacks against multiple victims and arrested one.
The two people who have been charged with conducting ransomware attacks are Yaroslav Vasinskyi, a 22 year old from the Ukraine and Yevgeniy Polyanin, a 28 year old from Russia.
While Vasinskyi has been arrested and faces potential extradition to the US, Polyanin is currently still at large but for how long that will remain the case depends largely on how much money they have.
That’s because the Department of Justice said it had also seized $6.1 million in funds said to be alleged ransomware payments received by Polyanin.
“The arrest of Yaroslav Vasinskyi, the charges against Yevgeniy Polyanin and seizure of $6.1 million of his assets, and the arrests of two other Sodinokibi/REvil actors in Romania are the culmination of close collaboration with our international, U.S. government and especially our private sector partners,” Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Christopher Wray, said in a statement.
“The FBI has worked creatively and relentlessly to counter the criminal hackers behind Sodinokibi/REvil. Ransomware groups like them pose a serious, unacceptable threat to our safety and our economic well-being. We will continue to broadly target their actors and facilitators, their infrastructure, and their money, wherever in the world those might be,” the director added.
Is this over? Far from it.
The US Department of State has offered a reward of $10 million “for information leading to the identification or location of any individual holding a key leadership position in the Sodinokibi ransomware variant transnational organized crime group”. If you have information about anybody involved in the group that will lead to their arrest, that could earn you a reward of $5 million.
This is a small win for authorities but we’re cautious when it comes to celebrating especially because the harm has already been done and REvil’s ransomware is out in the wild. With that having been said, the authorities are closing in on this cybercrime gang and we suspect they won’t be sleeping as well as they were before.
