A hacker from Michigan who stole and marketed the sensitive knowledge of tens of hundreds of College of Pittsburgh Clinical Middle (UPMC) workforce has been despatched to prison.
Former Federal Emergency Administration Agency (FEMA) IT expert Justin Sean Johnson pleaded guilty on Could 20 to counts 1 and 39 of a 43-count indictment.
The courtroom listened to that the 30-calendar year-previous previous resident of Detroit admitted infiltrating and hacking into the UPMC’s human methods server databases in 2013 and 2014.
Johnson utilised his tech techniques to steal private information and facts belonging to 65,000 UPMC staff members, which integrated W-2 wage and tax sorts. Utilizing the handles TheDearthStar, Dearthy Star, TDS, and DS, Johnson then marketed the stolen knowledge on the dark web by way of illicit marketplaces.
The criminals who obtained the stolen worker details utilized it to file hundreds of fake 1040 tax returns.
“These untrue 1040 filings claimed hundreds of 1000’s of pounds of false tax refunds, which they converted into Amazon.com gift cards, which have been then utilised to invest in Amazon merchandise, which was delivered to Venezuela,” mentioned the US Attorney’s Business for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
As a end result of the fraudulent claims, the United States Inner Revenue Services shed close to $1.7m.
UPMC wasn’t Johnson’s only focus on. The offender confessed to thieving and promoting virtually 90,000 extra (non-UPMC) sets of personally identifiable information (PII) to prospective buyers on dark web forums from 2014 to 2017.
On Friday, Main United States District Decide Mark Hornak handed Johnson the statutory utmost sentence of 60 months of incarceration for Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, and the statutory utmost of 24 months for Aggravated Identification Theft. Johnson’s sentences will operate consecutively, indicating the cyber-criminal will devote the next seven years behind bars.
“The steps of criminals like Justin Johnson can have very long-lasting and devastating effects on the lives of innocent people,” stated Yury Kruty, acting special agent in cost of IRS-Felony Investigation.
“Johnson carried out his intricate scheme with no regard for his victims. Today’s sentencing will with any luck , be a deterrent to other likely crooks who could be thinking about carrying out comparable conduct.”
Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-journal.com