A Forgotten Hacking Story

Some of my readers can remember 2012, but if you read a lot, it becomes hard to remember that story from so long ago.  I had to sit down and find some older articles because the new ones didn’t quite tell the story the way I remembered it.  It is about the hacking by Yevgeniy Nikulin, who is now in a U.S. court for crimes he was said to commit many years ago, the hacking of LinkedIn, Dropbox, Formspring, Inc. and Google.  The indictment is at https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/904516/download

He had been sitting in detention in Prague since 2016, and was finally extradited to the U.S. last week. I did remember that the Russians tried a good trick to get him back.  They tried to say he committed crimes in Russia and should be extradited to Russia instead.  They put pressure on to get him back, but that was harder to do than it would have been a few years ago.  That is pretty clever if you think about it.  He could then be tried, acquitted, and back on the street in a couple of days.  You have to admire the Russians thinking on that, but it didn’t work.    Fox Business says “But the Czech Republic's pro-Russia president, Milos Zeman, repeatedly asked [Czech Justice Minister Robert] Pelikan to allow Nikulin's extradition to Russia, the minister said. Zeman has no official say in cases like this one.”  

He is charged with a number of counts that will have in jail for a long time, absent a deal.  He was charged with stealing the user database of Formspring, then using G-mail to tell others that the database was for sale.  They must have a pretty good case on that one but there were probably a lot more the Justice Department is not talking about.  It would make a good movie.