It's pretty obvious they are either Russian ex military or moonlighting current military cyber experts. It may be true that they just wanted to make money, but now they've put Putin in a bind. Either he hunts them down or he runs the risk of the US looking the other way as its military hackers moonlight as extortionists and retaliate. Oh, and now Colonial will harden its systems so Russia's military wouldn't be able to pull off a hack on Colonial's pipelines if that were to become an expedient geopolitical manuever.

Western Europe is too stupid to backtrack on Nordstream 2, but this demonstrates why it should. So that aspect also hurts Russia--slightly.