REvil ransomware operation shuts down once again

It seems that the REvil ransomware operation has shut down once again after a threat actor has hijacked their Tor hidden service.

The REvil ransomware gang has shut down its operation once again after a threat actor has hijacked their Tor leak site and payment portal. The news of the hack was shared by the REvil representive ‘0_neday’ on the XSS hacking forum, he initially confirmed that someone has compromised their server, later denied it.

The news of the hack was first reported by Dmitry Smilyanets from Recorded Future.

0_neday added that someone brought up the REvil hidden services using their private keys, he also said that the gang did not found signs of compromise to their servers, anyway, they have decided to shut down the operation.

“But since we have today at 17.10 from 12:00 Moscow time, someone brought up the hidden-services of a landing and a blog with the same keys as ours, my fears were confirmed. The third party has backups with onion service keys,” wrote ‘0_neday’ on the hacking forum.

REvil operators will provide anyway the decryption keys to the affiliates to allow them to continue their operations.

At the time of this writing, it is not clear how threat actors could have had access to the private keys of the REvil operation, someone speculates that the keys were obtained by law enforcement since they resumed their activity in September after a short pause.

On July 2, the REvil ransomware gang hit the Kaseya cloud-based MSP platform impacting MSPs and their customers.

The group asked $70 million worth of Bitcoin for decrypting all systems impacted in the Kaseya supply-chain ransomware attack.

The attack caught the attention of the media and the police authorities that increased pressure on the group.

Starting from July 13, the infrastructure and the websites used by the REvil ransomware gang were mysteriously unreachable. The Tor leak site, the payment website “decoder[.]re”, and their backend infrastructure went offline simultaneously.

It is not clear if the operators shut down the operations due to the pressure of law enforcement after the recent Kaseya massive ransomware attack or if the infrastructure was seized as a result of an operation conducted by law enforcement.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, REvil ransomware operation)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.