Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Former Yahoo! Employee Avoids Jail After Hacking User Accounts

A former Yahoo! employee who admitted to hacking into the accounts of thousands of users was sentenced last week to five years of probation.

A former Yahoo! employee who admitted to hacking into the accounts of thousands of users was sentenced last week to five years of probation.

The man, Reyes Daniel Ruiz, 35, of Tracy, California, pleaded guilty in September 2019 to hacking roughly 6,000 Yahoo! accounts, looking for sexual photos and videos.

To access the victim accounts, he used cracked user passwords, but in some cases he abused internal Yahoo! systems for unauthorized access to accounts.

In his guilty plea, Ruiz admitted to mainly targeting the accounts of younger women, friends, and even colleagues. After accessing the accounts, he made copies of the discovered content and stored it at his home.

Ruiz, who has no criminal history, also admitted to targeting the Facebook, Gmail, iCloud, Dropbox, Hotmail, and other online accounts of victims.

Overall, he is believed to have downloaded between 1,000 and 4,000 images and videos, amounting to approximately 2 TB of data.

He also admitted to destroying the hard drive containing the downloaded content, which helped him receive a lenient sentence.

During his five years of probation, Ruiz is allowed to leave home for “verified employment, medical needs and religious services,” court records reveal. He was also ordered to pay nearly $120,000 in restitution and a $5,000 fine.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Related: Former Yahoo Programmer Pleads Guilty to Hacking User Accounts

Related: Developer of DDoS Botnets Based on Mirai Code Sentenced to Prison

Related: Man Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for DDoS Attacks

Related: UK National Lottery Hacker Sentenced to Prison

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.