A U.S. court on Thursday sentenced a 37-year-old Russian to 12
years in prison for perpetrating an international hacking campaign
that resulted in the heist of a trove of personal information from
several financial institutions, brokerage firms, financial news
publishers, and other American companies.
Andrei Tyurin was charged[1]
with computer intrusion, wire fraud, bank fraud, and illegal online
gambling offenses, and for his role in one of the largest thefts of
U.S. customer data from a single financial institution in history,
which involved the personal information of more than 80 million
J.P. Morgan Chase customers.
Besides the investment bank, some of the other major targets of
the hacks were E*Trade, Scottrade, and the Wall Street Journal.
Tyurin, who carried out the extensive hacking from his home in
Moscow between 2012 to mid-2015, is believed to have netted over
$19 million in criminal proceeds as part of his intrusion
schemes.
In one such instance of security fraud, Tyurin collaborated with
his partner Gery Shalon to artificially inflate the price of
certain stocks publicly traded in the U.S. by marketing said stocks
in a deceptive and misleading manner to customers of the victim
companies whose contact information were stolen during the
intrusions.
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| Photo Credit: REUTERS/Amir Cohen |
To carry out the attacks, Tyurin is alleged to have used
computer infrastructure located across five continents that were
remotely controlled and is said to have maintained persistent
access over long periods of time to the victims’ networks to
download and refresh the stolen data from the companies
periodically.
“And once his hacking activities were detected, TYURIN worked
with Shalon to destroy the evidence of their criminal activity and
undermine U.S. law enforcement’s efforts to identify and arrest
them,” the U.S. Southern District of New York said[2]
in a statement.
The development comes after Tyurin pleaded guilty in September
2019 to carry out the wire and bank fraud, computer intrusions, and
illegal online gambling. Tyurin has been in U.S. custody since he
was extradited from the country of Georgia in September 2018.