United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a supervising body for all district courts operating in North America, has asked a Russian cyber criminal not to pay any kind of compensation for breaching the databases of 3 corporate companies.
Previously, as per the order of July 2020, Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin was supposed to pay a hefty compensation to 3 companies- LinkedIn, Dropbox and Automatic, a former parent of WordPress.
The announcement was made as the said guy was found guilty of stealing over 100 million password credentials belonging to users related to LinkedIn, Dropbox and Automatic.
As per the latest court briefing, Nikulin gained fraudulent access to LinkedIn database to get the admin password of LinkedIn Engineer Nick Berry. He then installed a spying malware on his computer and then entered the company’s Virtual Private Network to gain access to the sensitive database of the professional network.
Nikulin also got the login credentials of Tom Wiegand, the employee of Dropbox, to gain access to sensitive info such as hashed passwords of several online service users, including that of John Sanders, the Formspring Employee.
So, for conducting the digital fraud Mr. Nikulin was asked to serve an 88 months of jail and was also ordered to pay a compensation $2m to LinkedIn, $514k to Dropbox and $20k to Formspring and $200k to WordPress parent company named Automatic that is now defunct since 2012.
However, as there was no substantial evidence proving his guilt to the core, the restitution has now been reversed.
Thus, Nikulin need not pay any compensation to the above stated 3 companies against the decision of Katherine Wawrzyniak, the Assistant United States Attorney.
