SAN FRANCISCO – A Ukrainian national arrested for his role in a hacking group that compromised millions of financial accounts has been sentenced to a decade in prison, said United States prosecutors yesterday.
Fedir Hladyr, 35, had a high-level role as a manager and systems administrator for the group known as FIN7.
He was one of three Ukrainians arrested in mid-2018 for hacking more than 100 US companies and stealing millions of credit and debit card numbers, said the Justice Department (DoJ).
“The defendant and his conspirators compromised millions of financial accounts, and caused over US$1 billion in losses to Americans and costs to the US economy,” said Nicholas McQuaid, acting assistant attorney-general, in a release.
Hladyr was arrested in Germany, then extradited to Seattle, where he pleaded guilty in 2019 to conspiring to commit computer hacking and wire fraud, according to authorities.
“This criminal organisation had more than 70 people organised into business units and teams,” said prosecutor Tessa Gorman in the release.
“This defendant worked at the intersection of all these activities, and thus bears heavy responsibility for billions in damage caused to companies and individual consumers.”
DoJ said members of the “prolific hacking group” also targeted computer networks in Britain, Australia and France.
In the US alone, FIN7 stole “more than 20 million customer card records from over 6,500 individual point-of-sale terminals at more than 3,600 separate business locations”, said prosecutors.
Among the companies that have publicly disclosed hacks by FIN7 are Chipotle Mexican Grill, Chili’s, Arby’s, Red Robin and Jason’s Deli.
“FIN7 carefully crafted email messages that would appear legitimate to a business’ employee, and accompanied emails with telephone calls intended to further legitimise the emails,” said prosecutors at the time of the arrests.
Once booby-trapped files attached to emails were opened, they triggered malware to steal payment card data, which was sold on online underground marketplaces. – AFP, April 17, 2021
