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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 21 2017, @03:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-long-enough dept.

Two hackers who separately profited from stealing personal and financial data have been sentenced in the US. Sergey Vovnenko was jailed for 41 months for hijacking computers and selling stolen credit card numbers. Eric Taylor, who stole and then published sensitive information about celebrities and public figures, received three years' probation. Both were also involved in attacks on security researcher Brian Krebs, who exposed their online criminal activity.

Mr Krebs said Vovnenko was one of the administrators of a discussion forum that traded in stolen payment cards and personal data, in a blogpost reporting the sentencing. [...]As well as serving a 41-month sentence, Vovnenko will also be supervised for three years following his release and must pay compensation of $83,368 (£67,000).

Taylor was arrested in 2012 as part of a massive series of raids on criminal hacker groups around the world, co-ordinated by the FBI. Taylor was a member of a hacker group that published some of the stolen data exposing sensitive information about celebrities, prominent public figures and ordinary Americans.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday February 21 2017, @06:48PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 21 2017, @06:48PM (#469815) Journal

    Data Theft Hackers Sentenced in US

    Gah.

    1. Hacker != Cracker Actually nevermind

    2. Data is very, very hard to steal, and I have serious doubts as to whether that occurred here.

    For someone to steal data, the following sequence of events must occur:

    1. The data is in the possession of entity "A" and not entity "B"
    2. Entity "B" steals the data
    3. Now the data is in the possession of entity "B" and not entity "A"

    Stealing the physical media on which the only copy of the data resides, for example, also accomplishes stealing the data. It could be argued (but not necessarily convincingly) that so-called "ransomware" can steal data.

    But given that 2 and 3 did not happen here by anyone's account, there was no data theft, regardless of whether there was hacking (disputed). In each case entity "A" still possessed the data, demonstrating that whether or not copies were made, the data was not stolen. Stealing deprives the owner of one or more items. After stealing happens, the owner no longer has the item(s). Even if it was absolutely proven that unauthorized access occurred, that does not mean that anyone stole anything.

    Come on, I get it when the various media and therefore TFA gets it wrong. I can see TFS getting it wrong, as it summarizes TFA.

    But the Soylent headline? In general, I would respectfully request that this community (and its editors) know the difference. If we don't make the world a better place in terms of representing our knowledge, who will?

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