REvil, a Russian-linked ransomware gang that has hacked more than 360 U.S. targets so far this year, vanished from the dark web early Tuesday without explanation.
The group's blog and payment-processing infrastructure are both offline, and it's unclear if this is because of the United States or Russia, or if REvil did this itself. President Biden on Friday said there would be consequences to REvil's actions, and the U.S. may conduct an operation against the servers used to carry out its attacks, NBC News reports. He also called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to do something about cyber criminals operating in Russia.
REvil encrypts computers and then demands that its victims pay up, threatening to release sensitive files to the dark web if they don't. The group recently targeted global meat supplier JBS, which paid $11 million in May to keep REvil from leaking its confidential files, and the software company Kaseya.
It's believed that there are possibly hundreds of other criminal cyber gangs running similar operations, although most are not as prolific as REvil. There are cases of ransomware gangs disbanding, but then coming back under a new name, NBC News reports.