Security News
Russian national Vladimir Dunaev has been sentenced to five years and four months in prison for his role in creating and distributing the Trickbot malware used in attacks against hospitals, companies, and individuals worldwide. The initial indictment accused Dunaev and eight co-defendants of engaging in the development, deployment, administration, and financial gains from the Trickbot malware operation.
The United States government has recommended that Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, the creator and lead administrator of the now-defunct BreachForums hacking forums, receive a sentence of 15 years in prison. "The defendant's administration of BreachForums played an instrumental role in bringing together more than 300,000 members to solicit, distribute, and access thousands of breached databases containing the stolen data of hundreds of companies, organizations, and governmental organizations of varying size and the PII of millions of U.S. persons," reads the sentencing proposal.
The U.S. District Court in Seattle sentenced ShinyHunters member Sebastien Raoult to three years in prison and ordered a restitution of $5,000,000. Previously, in September 2023, Raoult pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, facing a maximum punishment of 27 years in prison.
On Thursday, a Russian national pleaded guilty to charges related to his involvement in developing and deploying the Trickbot malware, which was used in attacks against hospitals, companies, and individuals in the United States and worldwide. According to court documents, a 40-year-old individual, also known as FFX, oversaw the development of TrickBot's browser injection component as a malware developer.
Another member of the Trickbot malware crew now faces a lengthy prison sentence amid US law enforcement's ongoing search for its leading members. Russian national Vladimir Dunaev, 40, faces a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison for his involvement in the now-shuttered Trickbot malware, which was often used to deploy ransomware.
Amir Hossein Golshan, 25, was sentenced to eight years in prison by a Los Angeles District Court and ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution for crimes involving SIM swapping, merchant fraud, support fraud, account hacking, and cryptocurrency theft. Golshan pleaded guilty on July 19, 2023, for hijacking the Instagram account of a prominent social media influencer.
A city court in Moscow on Wednesday convicted Group-IB co-founder and CEO Ilya Sachkov of "high treason" and jailed him for 14 years in a "strict regime colony" over accusations of passing...
A U.K. citizen who took part in the massive July 2020 hack of Twitter has been sentenced to five years in prison in the U.S. Joseph James O'Connor, 24, was awarded the sentence on Friday in the Southern District of New York, a little over a month after he pleaded guilty to the criminal schemes. The infamous Twitter breach allowed the defendant and his co-conspirators to obtain unauthorized access to backend tools used by Twitter, abusing them to hijack 130 popular accounts to perpetrate a crypto scam that netted them about $120,000 in illegal profits.
This time, the news is prison sentences for two of the main four original defendants in the infamous Megaupload saga. Megaupload's larger-than-life founder, who these days answers to the name Kim Dotcom, certainly likes to show off.
Nickolas Sharp, a former senior developer of Ubiquiti, was sentenced to six years in prison for stealing company data, attempting to extort his employer, and aiding the publication of misleading news articles that severely impacted the firm's market capitalization. While allegedly working as part of the incident response, the Department of Justice says Sharp posed as the anonymous hacker, demanding that Ubiquity pay 50 Bitcoin to learn of the exploited vulnerability and for the stolen data to be deleted.