US Jails Ukrainian For Hacking 6,000 Servers and Selling Access To Them
The US is punishing a Ukrainian man with four years in prison for cracking the passwords to over 6,000 servers, and then selling access to the computers on an black market website.
On Thursday, 28-year-old Glib Oleksandr Ivanov-Tolpintsev was sentenced to federal prison after the US extradited him from Ukraine on the hacking charges.
According to investigators, Ivanov-Tolpintsev operated a network of infected computers, also known as a botnet. He then used the botnet to remotely launch “brute-force” password guessing attempts on servers across the globe in an effort to learn the login credentials.
“From 2017 through 2019, Ivanov-Tolpintsev listed for sale thousands of login credentials of servers,” which included more than 100 servers in Florida, where he was tried and sentenced, the Justice Department said(Opens in a new window).
Federal officials didn’t name the online marketplace where the login credentials were sold. But a court document notes(Opens in a new window) the US seized the servers hosting the marketplace back in January 2019. That’s the same time federal investigators shut down xDedic, an illegal website that sold access to thousands of servers online.
“In total, the Marketplace offered over 700,000 compromised servers for sale; including at least 150,000 in the United States and at least 8,000 in Florida,” the sentencing document for Ivanov-Tolpintsev adds.
These servers belonged to numerous groups, including hospitals, government offices, universities and law firms. Such access could allow a cybercriminal to plant ransomware in a company’s network or engage in financial fraud by stealing tax documents and hijacking access to corporate accounts.
The sentencing documents says Ivanov-Tolpintsev himself
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