Security News > 2021 > October > Man gets 7 years in prison for hacking 65K health care employees
Justin Sean Johnson, also known as TheDearthStar and Dearthy Star, was sentenced this week to seen years in prison for the 2014 hack of the health care provider and insurer University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
After breaching UPMC's human resources databases, Johnson stole the Personally Identifiable Information and W-2 info of more than 65,000 employees and sold it on the dark web.
One year later, he pleaded guilty to stealing and selling the PII and W2 info of tens of thousands of UPMC employees.
Johnson breached UPMC's network in early December 2013 after hacking the health care provider's Oracle PeopleSoft human resource management system.
The same day, he gained access to the PII of roughly 23,500 UPMC employees after running a test query on the compromised HR database.
Between January 21 and February 14, 2014, he continued querying the database multiple times per day to steal the PII of tens of thousands of UPMC employees.