Cybercrime

Russian Man Who Laundered Money for Ryuk Ransomware Gang Sentenced

Russian national Denis Dubnikov has been sentenced to time served after he pleaded guilty to charges related to laundering money for the Ryuk ransomware group.

Eduard Kovacs

April 19, 2023

Denis Mihaqlovic Dubnikov, the Russian national who recently pleaded guilty to charges related to laundering money for the Ryuk ransomware group, has been sentenced to time served.

Authorities said Dubnikov laundered money for the cybercrime gang between 2018 and August 2021. He was arrested in the Netherlands in November 2021 and extradited to the United States in August 2022. In February 2023, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

According to the Justice Department, Dubnikov on one occasion laundered $400,000 worth of cryptocurrency obtained by the ransomware group from a victim in the United States.

The 30-year-old Russian national and other members of the conspiracy allegedly laundered a total of at least $70 million in ransom proceeds.

For the charges brought against him, the man faced 20 years in federal prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $500,000. However, he has been sentenced to time served and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution.

The Ryuk ransomware emerged in 2018 and it was one of the most active operations, until it was gradually replaced by Conti over the course of 2020 and 2021. In early 2021, researchers estimated that the Ryuk criminal enterprise had been worth $150 million.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Latest News

Click to comment

CIEM Chat: How to Reduce Cloud Identity Risk

March 26, 2024

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Virtual Event: Ransomware Resilience & Recovery Summit

April 17, 2024

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Navigating Vendor Speak: A Security Practitioner’s Guide to Seeing Through the Jargon

As a security industry, we need to focus our energies on those professionals among us who know how to walk the walk. (Joshua Goldfarb)

SD-WAN: Don’t Build a Dead End, Prepare for Future-Proof Secure Networking

SD-WAN must be scalable, stable, secure, and fully operational to serve as a strong base for seamless modernization and progression to SASE. (Etay Maor)

You Against the World: The Offenders Dilemma

Foreign attackers have many more toolsets at their disposal, so we need to make sure we’re selective about our modeling, preparation and how we assess and fortify ourselves. (Tom Eston)

Why Intelligence Sharing Is Vital to Building a Robust Collective Cyber Defense Program

With automated, detailed, contextualized threat intelligence, organizations can better anticipate malicious activity and utilize intelligence to speed detection around proven attacks. (Marc Solomon)

Know Your Audience When Speaking to Security Practitioners

How can security practitioners make sense of the vendor landscape and separate those who talk a good game from those who can execute, perform, and solve real problems for enterprises? (Joshua Goldfarb)

Cybercrime

Comodo Forums Hacked via Recently Disclosed vBulletin Vulnerability

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Eduard KovacsOctober 1, 2019