This week finally saw the federal sentencing of a former Yahoo software engineer who “admitted to using his access through his work at the company to hack into about 6,000 Yahoo accounts” back in 2018, according to America’s Department of Justice:
Ruiz admitted to targeting accounts belonging to younger women, including his personal friends and work colleagues. He made copies of images and videos that he found in the personal accounts without permission, and stored the data at his home. Once he had access to the Yahoo accounts, Ruiz admitted to compromising the iCloud, Facebook, Gmail, DropBox, and other online accounts of the Yahoo users in search of more private images and videos. After his employer observed the suspicious account activity, Ruiz admitted to destroying the computer and hard drive on which he stored the images.
He stopped working at Yahoo in July of 2018. The next month the FBI visited his home. He was indicted in April of 2019 and pleaded guilty in September — facing up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
But it was not until this week that a federal court finally handed down its sentence for the “former Yahoo! engineer who hacked 6,000 accounts on a hunt for private sexual videos and pictures,” according to one Bay Area newspaper.
The sentence? Five years of probation, with a home confinement condition:
Reyes Daniel Ruiz, 35, of Tracy, is allowed to leave his home for “verified employment, medical needs and religious services,” according to the sentencing terms. He has also been ordered to pay nearly $125,000 in fines and restitution, court records show…
He also accessed financial information, but his main goal was to steal pornographic files, prosecutors said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Kaleba asked for Ruiz to be sentenced to “a period of incarceration,” arguing he’d violated not only the trust of his employee but the privacy of thousands of people. “By his estimation, he downloaded approximately two terabytes of data, and possessed between 1,000 and 4,000 private images and videos,” Kaleba wrote in a sentencing memo.
The defense argued that Ruiz, who has no criminal history, deserved leniency because he accepted responsibility quickly. He admitted to destroying the hard drive where he stored the ill-gotten files when the FBI visited his home in August 2018. Ruiz told federal investigators that he acquired the pictures and videos for his own personal “self-gratification” and that he didn’t share them online, a pre-sentence report says.
In October Gizmodo reported that Ruiz was now working for a Silicon Valley company specializing in SSO (single sign-on) solutions.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot