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 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 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.