Pierluigi Paganini September 02, 2016

The notorious Romanian hacker Guccifer has been sentenced to 52 months in prison by a US court for aggravated identity theft and hacking.

The notorious Romanian hacker Guccifer has been sentenced to prison by a US court.

Marcel Lehel Lazar (44), this is the real name of Guccifer, has been sentenced to 52 months in prison for aggravated identity theft and hacking into to a protected computer.

Guccifer was arrested in January 2014 in Romania, where he was known to law enforcement for hacking into the accounts of local celebrities. In June 2014 he was pleading guilty and sentenced by a Romanian court to 7 years in prison for accessing the email accounts of the head of the Romanian intelligence service, George Maior, and of the politician Corina Cretu.

In March 2016, the Romanian authorities accepted the US request for Lazar’s extradition.

Guccifer is very popular in the hacking community, but he became famous to the public after hacking the online accounts of numerous public figures, including members of the Bush family, journalists, actors, former members of the U.S. Cabinet and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the senior political member Sidney Blumenthal and a former presidential advisor.

Lazar also claimed to have hacked the Hillary Clinton’s private email server, in the past months he had a series of interviews with Fox and NBC News outlets, providing details about his intrusion.

Guccifer exploited Clinton’s connection with Blumenthal to access her email server.

Lazar first got into Blumenthal’s AOL email, in March 2013, through detailed Internet research to help him guess Blumenthal’s security question.  From Blumenthal’s email, Lazar was then able to track emails based on IP headers and ultimately gain access to the Clinton email server.

Lazar described the server to NBC News (from a Bucharest jail cell) as, ‘an open orchid on the Internet’ where he was able to find ‘hundreds of folders’.  While he says he only accessed the server twice, he claims to have obtained 2-gigabytes of information.  He has thus far refused to provide any of the emails to which he gained access.  Of the 2-gigabytes of information, he has told Fox News they are hidden because they are ‘too hot’ and ‘a matter of national security’.

It has been of concern about who has had access to the Clinton email server.  Lazar has said he was able to see ‘up to 10,…, IPs from other parts of the world.’ Research into emails during Clinton’s time as Secretary of State has already shown approximately 2,200 emails that contained classified information, with some identified as “Top Secret”.

According to US authorities, the hacker admitted having hacked email and social media accounts of roughly 100 Americans between October 2012 and January 2014.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Hillary Clinton, Guccifer)