Two men have been charged for perpetrating what is claimed to be the largest data breach “in the history of the Internet” leading to the theft of more than a billion email addresses and other confidential information.
The attacks, which ran from February 2009 to June 2012, saw the duo hack into eight US email service providers.
Viet Quoc Nguyen of Vietnam allegedly hacked into the email service providers, stealing proprietary marketing data containing more than 1 billion email addresses, the US Department of Justice said. Nguyen, along with Giang Hoang Vu, also of Vietnam, then allegedly used the data to send spam messages to tens of millions of users, generating $2m in sales.
Vu pleaded guilty in US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia last month, to conspiracy to commit computer fraud. He was arrested by Dutch law enforcement in 2012 and extradited to the US a year ago. He is due to be sentenced on April 21. Nguyen remains at large.
A federal grand jury returned an indictment this week against a third member of the gang – David-Manuel Santos Da Silva of Montreal, Canada – for conspiring to launder the proceeds obtained as a result of the massive data breach.
He was indicted for conspiracy to commit money laundering for helping Nguyen and Vu to generate revenue from the spam emails and launder the proceeds.
Da Silva was co-owner of 21 Celsius, a Canadian corporation that ran e-commerce site Marketbay.com, according to court documents. Da Sliva allegedly entered into an affiliate marketing arrangement with Nguyen that allowed the defendants to generate revenue from the alleged data thefts.
