A cyber-felony who hacked into numerous tech businesses and stole 117 million LinkedIn passwords has been sentenced to extra than seven yrs in prison by a US district decide.
Yevgeniy Alexandrovich Nikulin was found guilty by a jury in July this 12 months of breaching the inner networks of LinkedIn, Dropbox, and the now defunct social networking enterprise Formspring.
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The 32-calendar year-previous Russian national exfiltrated the person databases of the providers he compromised, then bought the facts on the dark net.
The malicious hacker compromised all three businesses in the spring of 2012, breaking into LinkedIn in between March 3 and March 4. He attained accessibility to the company’s internal network by infecting the laptop computer of an staff with malware that enabled him to exploit the victim’s VPN.
Nikulin stole LinkedIn consumer information that involved hundreds of thousands of usernames, passwords, and email messages, then employed it to start spear-phishing assaults versus workers at other providers. 1 corporation he skewered with this technique was Dropbox.
Right after breaching the account of a Dropbox employee, Nikulin was in a position to accessibility a folder made up of business info amongst Could 14 and July 25, 2012. Court files state the undesirable actor stole information on 68 million Dropbox users.
Utilizing the same ruse, Nikulin was also able to spear the account of an engineer doing work for Formspring. Involving June 12 and June 29, 2012, the cyber-legal is thought to have accessed the documents of 30 million Formspring buyers.
Nikulin was also discovered guilty of hacking his way into WordPress.com parent corporation Automattic, however no evidence of info theft from this organization was identified.
Trial paperwork show that Nikulin was resident in Moscow when he committed these offenses. The info he swiped was marketed for sale on the dark internet in 2015 and 2016 by many traders in illegal info.
The Russian nationwide was arrested while on vacation in Prague in Oct 2016 as aspect of an international operation involving the FBI. He was extradited to the United States in 2017.
On Wednesday, US District Decide William Alsup sentenced Nikulin to 88 months in jail. Alsup said he hoped the sentence would prevent others from committing comparable crimes.
Some parts of this article is sourced from:
www.infosecurity-journal.com