A Russian hacker charged with data theft in the U.S. has admitted to being part of one of the largest thefts of consumer data from U.S. financial institutions, brokerage firms, and other companies, Bloomberg reported citing a statement from the U.S. Justice Department.
35-year-old Russian national Andrei Tyurin from Moscow, who was extradited from Georgia last year, pleaded guilty to computer intrusion, wire fraud, bank fraud, and illegal online gambling offenses, the Justice Department said.
He’s accused of helping steal the personal data of more than 80 million customers from investment bank JP Morgan Chase from 2012 until mid-2015 in a hacking scheme uncovered by federal prosecutors four years ago. At the time the breach was described as the largest single theft of its kind.
“Ultimately, he [Tyurin] gathered the customer data of more than 80 million victims, one of the largest thefts of U.S. customer data from a single financial institution in history. With today’s plea, Tyurin’s global reign of computer intrusion is over and he faces significant time in a U.S. prison for his crimes,” Berman said in the statement.
Tyurin also allegedly targeted other U.S. financial institutions, brokerage firms, financial news publishers, and other American companies. He’s scheduled to be sentenced on February 13, 2020.
In building their case against Tyurin, prosecutors amassed more than 3,000 pages of digital chats between him and his co-conspirators, primarily in Russian. They also recovered evidence from electronic devices seized from other defendants after they were arrested in Israel, as well as data from the companies documenting the intrusion into their networks.
Tyurin was charged in a sealed indictment in 2015, but he remained at large until his apprehension in Georgia and September 2018 extradition to the U.S.
Court filings show that Tyurin agreed to plead guilty a month ago and that he had been in negotiations with the government since the spring. He has been held at the federal jail in lower Manhattan since his extradition to the U.S.
