Security News
A California man who hacked thousands of Apple iCloud accounts was sentenced to 8 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy and computer fraud in October 2021. Starting from as early as September 2014, 41-year-old Hao Kuo Chi from La Puente, California, started marketing himself as "Icloudripper4you," someone capable of breaching iCloud accounts and stealing anything contained in the linked iCloud storage.
A 33-year-old Illinois man has been sentenced to two years in prison for running websites that paying customers used to launch more than 200,000 distributed denial-of-services attacks. Gatrel, was convicted of owning and operating two websites - DownThem.org and AmpNode.com - that sold DDoS attacks.
An Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison for operating a distributed denial of service platform that allowed threat actors to conduct over 200,000 attacks. The sentenced man, Matthew Gatrel, 33, had created and operated the websites "Downthem.org" and "Ampnode.com." The former sold subscriptions to a powerful DDoS arsenal, and the latter was a bulletproof hosting service that also aided customers in launching their own DDoS attacks.
Han Bing, a former database administrator for Lianjia, a Chinese real-estate brokerage giant, has been sentenced to 7 years in prison for logging into corporate systems and deleting the company's data. Bing allegedly performed the act in June 2018, when he used his administrative privileges and "Root" account to access the company's financial system and delete all stored data from two database servers and two application servers.
Quite literally, the problem scales linearly, so that if it would take you 100 years to crack 1,000,000 passwords on your own computer, then it would take only one year using 100 computers; just over a month with 1000; and under an hour if you had 1,000,000 computers at your disposal. If we assume that many, if not most, of Tolpintsev's illegally-acquired passwords were cracked from password databases stolen from various cloud services, then it's reasonable to assume that many of the new passwords added to his online catalogue each week came from a randomly chosen pool of users.
Another member of notorious cybercrime ring FIN7 is headed to jail after the gang breached major companies' networks across the US and stole more than $1 billion from these businesses' customers. Ukrainian-born Denys Iarmak, 32, who worked as a penetration tester for the criminal group, was sentenced to five years in prison for his affiliation with FIN7.
"Denys Iarmak, a Ukrainian member and a"pen tester for the FIN7 financially-motivated hacking group, was sentenced on Thursday to 5 years in prison for breaching victims' networks and stealing credit card information for roughly two years, between November 2016 and November 2018. Iarmak is the third FIN7 member sentenced in the US after Fedir Hladyr received ten years in prison on April 16, 2021, and Andrii Kolpakov got seven years on June 24, 2021, following their 2018 arrest.
Maksim Berezan, an Estonian man linked to multimillion-dollar ransomware attacks, was sentenced on Friday to 66 months in prison for his involvement in online fraud schemes. According to the indictment, between July 2009 and December 2015, Berezan was a member of the exclusive DirectConnection cybercrime forum Russian-speaking cybercriminals could join after being vetted by three other members.
Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, a Canadian man charged by the US for his involvement in NetWalker ransomware attacks, was sentenced to 6 years and 8 months in prison after pleading guilty before an Ontario judge to multiple offenses linked to attacks on 17 Canadian victims. The US Department of Justice said in January 2021 that Desjardins allegedly obtained more than $27.6 million after multiple successful attacks and extortion attempts since April 2020, when he first took up his new ransomware affiliate role.
Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has been unable to comply with the settlement terms of a 27-year-old lawsuit over prison conditions because of a ransomware attack last week that saw prisoners back under manual control. Commissioners told the court that all of Bernalillo County, which covers the US state of New Mexico's largest city Albuquerque, had been affected by a January 5, 2022, ransomware attack, including the Metropolitan Detention Center that houses some of the state's incarcerated.