The tweet was deleted by the author.
But we saved everything 🙂.
Canadian authorities extradited 35-year-old Ryan James Roach to the United States on charges of hacking university supercomputers to illegally mine cryptocurrency. Prosecutors allege that he and an accomplice infiltrated university networks, stole login credentials and used computing resources without authorization.
The charges were announced by the U.S. Department of Justice. The second defendant is 41-year-old Matthew James Stubbings of Ontario, whose extradition proceedings are ongoing.
View post on X Loading...
Roach was brought to the United States on October 28 and subsequently appeared in court in Rochester, New York. The defendants face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
According to the indictment, the suspects targeted educational institutions in four states—New York, Tennessee, North Carolina and Massachusetts—between June 2016 and December 2019.
The attackers identified vulnerabilities in university networks, infiltrated systems and installed malicious software. They used the access to steal login credentials and secretly mine cryptocurrencies.
To carry out the attacks, the suspects rented virtual servers in several countries, registering them under fictitious names. They used this infrastructure to distribute malware and store stolen data.
The hackers also routed their attacks through previously compromised computers to conceal their origins. The DOJ did not specify which cryptocurrency the attackers mined.
Such attacks are known as cryptojacking—the unauthorized use of someone else's computing resources to mine cryptocurrency.
However, researchers at Google Threat Intelligence Group have warned of the growing threat of LLMjacking. In these attacks, cybercriminals steal access to corporate AI models and resell computing resources, leaving account owners responsible for the costs.
According to Google's Mandiant division, unauthorized use of AI services has, in some cases, resulted in charges exceeding $100,000 per day. Some affected organizations incurred costs of up to $1 million before access was blocked.
A recent example of a large-scale cyberattack was the October 29 Binance hack, which affected $6.34 billion in assets. A preliminary investigation found that hackers used fake job interviews and malware to infiltrate the company's infrastructure.
Earlier, we reported that cryptocurrency platform Mercado Bitcoin announced a phased restoration of access following a cyberattack. The company also pledged to compensate affected users for their losses.