Security News
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.
A U.K. national has pleaded guilty in connection with the July 2020 Twitter attack affecting numerous high-profile accounts and defrauding other users of the platform. Joseph James O'Connor, who also went by the online alias PlugwalkJoe, admitted to "His role in cyberstalking and multiple schemes that involve computer hacking, including the July 2020 hack of Twitter," the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Joe Sullivan, the former Uber CSO who has been convicted last year for attempting to cover up a data breach Uber suffered in 2016 and kept it hidden from the Federal Trade Commission, has been sentenced to three years of probation plus 200 hours of community service. Sullivan became Chief Security Officer at Uber in April 2015, and in November 2016 testified before the FTC under oath that the company had taken to keep customer data secure following a 2014 data breach.
After stealing the data, he decided to blackmail the clinic for €450,000; when that didn't work he stooped yet lower and tried blackmailing the patients for €200 each, with a warning that the "Fee" would increase to €500 after 24 hours. Patients who didn't pay up after a further 48 hours, the blackmailer said, would be doxxed, a jargon term meaning to have your personal data exposed publicly on purpose.
Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, the 20-year-old founder and the administrator of the now-defunct BreachForums has been formally charged in the U.S. with conspiracy to commit access device fraud. If proven guilty, Fitzpatrick, who went by the online moniker "Pompompurin," faces a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison.
An ex-General Electric engineer has been sentenced to two years in prison after being convicted of stealing the US giant's turbine technology for China. New York resident Xiaoqing Zheng, 59, who used to be employed at GE Power and specialized in turbine sealing technology, was convicted of conspiracy to commit economic espionage at the end of March after a jury trial in the Northern District of New York courthouse.