Rus is jailed for seven years in the US for hacks on LinkedIn and Dropbox

32-year-old Russian Yevgeniy Nikulin has been sentenced to 88 months in prison in the United States. He is sentenced for hacking LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring and stealing and reselling user data. Nikulin was found guilty by a jury in July. The court has now ruled. The Russian is jailed for hacking computers from LinkedIn, Dropbox and the no longer existing social network Formspring. Nikulin installed malware to gain access to employee accounts to access user databases. The 2012 hack on LinkedIn stole data from 117 million members. The hack on Dropbox that same year affected 69 million users. According to the ruling, Nikulin sold the stolen data. The hacks have had a major impact worldwide. The databases are still used by criminals to penetrate other accounts, where users sometimes still use the same passwords. According to the ruling, evidence shows that Nikulin hacked a computer from Moscow of a LinkedIn employee in the United States. The Russian installed malware on his computer in order to be able to operate it remotely. For example, the hacker gained access to LinkedIn’s VPN and was able to steal the user database including encrypted passwords. The hacks at Dropbox and Formspring are done in a similar way. Although the passwords were encrypted, the encryption was weak and easy to crack. Nikulin also broke into WordPress’s parent company, Automattic, but there is no evidence that the Russian has stolen user data there. Nikulin was arrested in the Czech Republic in 2016 and extradited to the United States in 2018. The prison sentence is effective immediately.