A hacker from Michigan who stole and marketed the sensitive info of tens of 1000’s of University of Pittsburgh Health-related Center (UPMC) workforce has been despatched to jail.
Former Federal Crisis Administration Agency (FEMA) IT professional Justin Sean Johnson pleaded guilty on May well 20 to counts 1 and 39 of a 43-count indictment.
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The court listened to that the 30-yr-old previous resident of Detroit admitted infiltrating and hacking into the UPMC’s human methods server database in 2013 and 2014.
Johnson applied his tech competencies to steal individual info belonging to 65,000 UPMC staff, which incorporated W-2 wage and tax kinds. Employing the handles TheDearthStar, Dearthy Star, TDS, and DS, Johnson then sold the stolen facts on the dark web by means of illicit marketplaces.
The criminals who obtained the stolen staff info employed it to file hundreds of false 1040 tax returns.
“These fake 1040 filings claimed hundreds of countless numbers of bucks of bogus tax refunds, which they transformed into Amazon.com present playing cards, which were being then applied to buy Amazon goods, which was shipped to Venezuela,” stated the US Attorney’s Business for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
As a consequence of the fraudulent promises, the United States Inner Profits Provider dropped approximately $1.7m.
UPMC wasn’t Johnson’s only target. The offender confessed to thieving and marketing approximately 90,000 more (non-UPMC) sets of individually identifiable info (PII) to consumers on dark web message boards from 2014 to 2017.
On Friday, Chief United States District Choose Mark Hornak handed Johnson the statutory utmost sentence of 60 months of incarceration for Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, and the statutory most of 24 months for Aggravated Id Theft. Johnson’s sentences will operate consecutively, indicating the cyber-crook will spend the next seven years behind bars.
“The steps of criminals like Justin Johnson can have prolonged-long lasting and devastating outcomes on the life of harmless people,” explained Yury Kruty, acting exclusive agent in cost of IRS-Legal Investigation.
“Johnson carried out his intricate scheme with no regard for his victims. Today’s sentencing will hopefully be a deterrent to other probable crooks who may possibly be thinking about carrying out similar perform.”
Some components of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com