A Ukrainian hacker was sentenced on May 22 to 30 months in a U.S. prison for a scheme using stolen unpublished news releases to make around $30 million in profits.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey said Vadym Iermolovych, a 29-year-old Kyiv man, was one of several people involved in the scheme who were arrested in Ukraine and the United States for accessing more than 150,000 press releases that contained sensitive financial and corporate data that they shared with stock traders before the information was released to the public.
Authorities said the traders paid the hackers for access to the overseas servers where the information was stored.
They were paid, in part, a percentage of the money the traders made from their illegal trading activities.
Iermolovych, who pleaded guilty in May 2016 to charges of aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire and computer hacking, was also ordered by a court in New Jersey to pay more than $3 million in restitution.