Former Yahoo! employee who accessed 6K accounts avoids jail

A former Yahoo! employee who hacked into the accounts of thousands of users was sentenced to five years of probation.

In September the former Yahoo software engineer Reyes Daniel Ruiz has admitted in court to hacking into 6,000 Yahoo! accounts back in 2018.

Last week Ruis (35), of Tracy, California, was sentenced to five years of probation after he admitted the hack, the man was looking for sexual photos and videos.

The man accessed the users’ victim accounts, using cracked passwords, but in some cases, he also used internal Yahoo! systems for access to the accounts.

In October, Ruiz, who has no previous criminal records, admitted to having targeted accounts belonging to younger women, work colleagues, and his friends.

The man made copies of the content he has found in the compromised Yahoo! accounts. According to the investigators he has stolen between 1,000 and 4,000 images and videos, for a total amount of 2 TB of data.

Ruiz was also targeting other online accounts of victims, including Facebook, Gmail, iCloud, Dropbox, and Hotmail ones.

The man admitted to destroying the hard drive containing the stolen images and video, a circumstance that allowed him to receive a minor sentence. Ruiz confirmed that he acquired the pictures and videos for his own personal “self-gratification,” and he didn’t share them online.

According to prosecutors, the man also accessed financial information contained in the accounts, but it was not his main goal.

For five years, Ruiz is allowed to leave home for “verified employment, medical needs and religious services.” He was condemned to pay nearly $120,000 in restitution and a $5,000 fine.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Yahoo!)

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