Russian hacker pleads guilty to cyberattacks on US, Ukrainian oil and gas facilities

That is according to Bloomberg, Ukrinform reports.

Artem Revenskii, a Russian national known in cybercriminal circles as "Digit," was charged by federal prosecutors in California earlier this month with conspiracy to cause damage to protected computers, wire fraud and identity theft. On Thursday, Revenskii entered into a plea agreement in exchange for a reduced sentence recommendation.

Revenskii, who primarily resided in Russia, came into U.S. custody on November 2, 2025. Revenskii was arrested in the Dominican Republic and put on a plane to Newark, New Jersey, according to his lawyer John Targowski.

According to prosecutors, Revenskii was a member of a Russian government-sponsored hacking group known as Sector16. According to federal court filings, he worked with the group to gain access and damage critical systems for oil and gas infrastructure facilities in the U.S., Ukraine, Germany, France and Latvia.

According to prosecutors, the group took control of oil pumps and storage reservoirs at an unnamed Texas facility in January 2025. Throughout that year, the group also hacked an oil and gas facility in North Dakota and then developed a plan to sell access to the Russian government, according to a criminal information filed in the Central District of California federal court. Facilities in New York and Pennsylvania were also successfully hacked.

Sector16 also plotted to sabotage critical infrastructure in Ukraine, including gas stations in Kyiv, and it planned to disable Ukraine's whole electric grid, authorities said. According to them, in September 2025, the hackers accessed a natural gas facility in Poltava.

In text messages, Revenskii discussed a plan to use the access to cause physical damage by attacking the hardware, deforming the gas pipeline and overloading ventilation equipment and gas extraction equipment.

Revenskii helped fund Sector16's hacking with a hotel booking conspiracy in which the hackers would steal a victim’s identity, book hotel reservations using stolen funds, and then split the proceeds with complicit hotels that signaled they would not flag the transactions for fraud, prosecutors said.

The scheme, which aimed to bring in over $150,000 in profits in just a few months in 2024, spanned the globe and aimed to give the complicit hotels 50% of the stolen funds.

Illustrative photo: HUR