Two hackers have pleaded guilty for stealing account information of over 57 million users belonging to tech companies Uber and Lynda- now renamed as LinkedIn Learning after acquisition by the professional networking giant.
Highly placed sources say that the two hackers, Brandon Glover, of Florida and Vasile Mereacre of Toronto, Canada were presented before the Florida Court of Justice yesterday and admitted for hacking information from Amazon Web Servers related to two companies. They also agreed that their intention to fraudulently access the data was to blackmail the data owners for a ransom payment.
Based on a personal bond, they both were released on bail on a condition to attend the hearing in March next year.
The Justice Department says that the two men downloaded the information related to 57 million users which includes driver data from the AWS server at the end of 2016 to later blackmail the owners for ransom.
Details are now out that two former employees of UBER agreed to pay $100,000 in bitcoins through a third party to the hackers for retraining them from disclosing the stolen details to the world via the dark web.
Meanwhile, the two hackers also tried to blackmail the officials of Lynda.com with a promise that their 90k records will not be deleted if they paid a fancy ransom in crypto. However, the duo stopped further correspondence, as the IT staff of Lynda.com sought to identify them.
More details will be updated shortly!
