Russian national pleads guilty in global hacking scheme
Russian Hacker Vladimir Drinkman faces 30 years sentence after pleading guilty to hacking NASDAQ, stealing 160 million credit cards.
Vladimir Drinkman, a 34 year old Russian hacker has pleaded guilty in US Federal Court for his role in hacking NASDAQ, JCPenny, 7 Eleven, Dow Jones, JetBlue and other major organisations in the United States. Reportedly, the hacker admitted his involvement in the world wide scheme that ultimately captured details of more than 160 million credit cards.
Federal attorneys in New Jersey who charged Drinkman with conspiracy charges involving wire fraud and unauthorized access to protected computers said the case was the largest to ever be prosecuted on U.S. soil. They alleged that the American companies and individuals lost more than $300 million because of the date breaches perpetrated by Drinkman.
Drinkman, who was arrested in the Netherlands in 2012 and extradited to the U.S. earlier this year, is scheduled to be sentenced in January.
โDefendants like Vladimir Drinkman, who have the skills to break into our computer networks and the inclination to do so, pose a cutting edge threat to our economic well-being, our privacy and our national security,โ U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman of the District of New Jersey said in a statement.
Drinkman and his gang, a number of whom remain at large, would monitor the computers of target companies and scan for vulnerabilities in their SQL implementation to create backdoors and ultimately netting the confidential data and later selling it on “underground” forums of the Internet.
Three of his alleged co-conspirators remain fugitives. A fourth, Dmitriy Smilianets, 32, of Moscow, who allegedly sold the stolen information, remains in federal custody.