Russian Hacker’s $1.7M Restitution Order Overturned

A Russian cyber-felony who hacked into a few tech firms and stole additional than 100 million user credentials will not have to pay restitution to his company victims.

Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin was found guilty in July 2020 of triggering facts breaches at LinkedIn, Dropbox, and the now defunct social media system Automated in 2012. 

Talking in the course of the closing arguments of Nikulin’s trial, Assistant United States Lawyer Katherine Wawrzyniak told the jury: “The data from a person intrusion facilitated the following.”

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Nikulin acquired obtain to LinkedIn’s info by hacking into the individual laptop of LinkedIn engineer Nick Berry, then installing malware that gave him accessibility to Berry’s virtual personal network (VPN) and the login credentials used by Berry to operate remotely.

Nikulin employed Berry’s qualifications to access LinkedIn’s inside databases and steal consumer credentials, which he then bought to associates. Some of the stolen info was utilised by Nikulin to infiltrate the perform account of Dropbox worker Tom Wiegand and get entry to a shared personnel Dropbox account.

Upcoming, Nikulin utilized credentials stolen from Dropbox to compromise the operate account of Formspring staff John Sanders and exfiltrate thousands and thousands of hashed user passwords. 

Nikulin was sentenced to provide 88 months in federal prison by US District Judge William Alsup. Nikulin was more ordered to pay back LinkedIn fifty percent the $2m restitution that the corporation had requested.

Alsup also ordered Nikulin to spend restitution of $514,000 to Dropbox, $20,000 to Formspring, and $200,000 to WordPress mum or dad organization Computerized.

On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit overturned the restitution award. A three-judge panel uncovered inadequate proof to justify the compensation payment of $1.7m.

The order issued by the panel mentioned: “Although trial testimony and logs submitted at demo showed the extent of the victims’ responses to the pc intrusions, that proof did not provide a foundation for determining the prices incurred by the victims in mounting people responses.”

Letters submitted to the court by the sufferer organizations have been considered by the judges not to fulfill government prerequisites to present a full accounting of the losses to every single sufferer to the extent practicable.

However, the panel did uphold the jail sentence of additional than 7 several years handed to Nikulin by Alsup.