Two indicted for stealing 1B email addresses in historic breach

  • 6 March 2015
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The Vietnamese defendants are accused of using stolen email addresses for a spamming operation

Mar 6, 2015 10:55 AM By Grant Gross
 
The attacks, running from February 2009 to June 2012, resulted in the largest data breach of names and email addresses "in the history of the Internet," Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said in a statement. After stealing the email addresses, the defendants sent spam emails to tens of millions of users, generating US$2 million in sales, according to the DOJ.
 
Viet Quoc Nguyen, 28, of Vietnam, allegedly hacked into the email service providers, stealing proprietary marketing data containing more than 1 billion email addresses, the DOJ said. Nguyen, along with Giang Hoang Vu, 25, also of Vietnam, then allegedly used the data to send spam messages, the agency alleged.
 
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More infromation from Brian Krebs.
 
6th March 2015
 
U.S. federal prosecutors in Atlanta today unsealed indictments against two Vietnamese men and a Canadian citizen in connection with what’s being called “one of the largest reported data breaches in U.S. history.” The government isn’t naming the victims in this case, but all signs point to the 2011 hack of Texas-based email marketing giant Epsilon.
 
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/epsilon.png
 
The government alleges the defendants made more than $2 million blasting out spam to more than one billion email addresses stolen from several email service providers (ESPs), companies that manage customer email marketing on behalf of major corporate brands.  The indictments further allege that the men sent the junk missives by hijacking the email servers used by these ESPs.
“This case reflects the cutting-edge problems posed by today’s cybercrime cases, where the hackers didn’t target just a single company; they infiltrated most of the country’s email distribution firms,” said Acting U.S. Attorney John Horn.  “And the scope of the intrusion is unnerving, in that the hackers didn’t stop after stealing the companies’ proprietary data—they then hijacked the companies’ own distribution platforms to send out bulk emails and reaped the profits from email traffic directed to specific websites.”
 
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Posted on 09 March 2015.Viet Quoc Nguyen and Giang Hoang Vu, both citizens of Vietnam who resided for a period of time in the Netherlands, have been indicted on Friday for their role in a massive data breach of Email Service Providers all over the United States. In addition, a federal grand jury returned an indictment last week week against David-Manuel Santos Da Silva, a citizen of Canada, who is charged with conspiring with Nguyen and others to money launder the proceeds of Nguyen’s computer hacking offenses.

According to Acting U.S. Attorney John Horn, between approximately February 2009 and June 2012, Viet Quoc Nguyen allegedly hacked into at least eight Email Service Providers (ESPs) all over the United States, and stole confidential information, including proprietary marketing data containing over one billion email addresses. full article

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