US jails hacker linked to IS for 20 years

US authorities have sentenced a Kosovar hacker to 20 years in prison for hacking into an American company. The stolen personal data was passed on to the terrorist group IS, which drew up a ‘hit list’ with it.

The US Department of Justice announced the conviction Friday. It concerns 20-year-old Ardit Ferizi, who uses the pseudonym Th3Dir3ctorY online. He allegedly broke into an undisclosed American company, where he stole personal data. This would also include data on 1,351 people who work in the US military or work for the government. How Ferizi entered the servers has not been disclosed.

The captured data was then passed on to IS and published online last August. The people whose data had been stolen were threatened with death. The list of released data included names, email addresses, passwords, locations and phone numbers.

Finally, after a manhunt in Malaysia, Ferizi was arrested and then extradited to the United States. In June, he admitted his guilt, but the sentence had not yet been determined. With a 20-year prison sentence, the United States is trying to send a signal to hackers who work for terrorist groups; the authorities probably hope to deter other hackers. Attorney General John P. Carlin called the case “one of the first truly dangerous threats to national security from a combination of terrorism and hacking.”