Three Indicted, Accused in ‘Largest Data Breach…in the History of the Internet’
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jrwasserman/iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) — An indictment against three men charged in connection with one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history was unsealed on Thursday.
The Department of Justice said Friday that two of the men, Vietnamese citizens residing in the Netherlands, were involved in the hack, while a third man, a Canadian citizen, conspired to launder the proceeds of the breach.
“These men — operating from Vietnam, the Netherlands, and Canada — are accused of carrying out the largest data breach of names and email addresses in the history of the Internet,” Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said in a statement. “The defendants allegedly made millions of dollars by stealing over a billion email addresses from email service providers.”
The DOJ says Viet Quoc Nguyen, 28, a Vietnamese citizen, hacked into at least eight email service providers and stole confidential information. Along with Giang Hoang Vu, 25, he used that data to spam tens of millions of email recipients.
David-Manuel Santos Da Silva, 33, was also indicted for conspiracy to commit money laundering for helping the two men to “generate revenue from the ‘spam’ and launder the proceeds.”
Vu was arrested by Dutch law enforcement in 2012 and Da Silva was arrested on Feb. 12, 2015. Nguyen remains a fugitive.
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