COURT DOC: Three Defendants Charged with One of the Largest Reported Data Breaches in U.S. History

An indictment was unsealed yesterday against two Vietnamese citizens who resided in the Netherlands, for their roles in hacking email service providers throughout the United States. The guilty plea of one of the defendants was also unsealed at the same time. In addition, a federal grand jury returned an indictment this week against a Canadian citizen for conspiring to launder the proceeds obtained as a result of the massive data breach.

According to allegations in the indictments, between February 2009 and June 2012, Viet Quoc Nguyen, 28, a citizen of Vietnam, allegedly hacked into at least eight email service providers (ESPs) throughout the United States and stole confidential information, including proprietary marketing data containing over one billion email addresses. Nguyen, along with Giang Hoang Vu, 25, also a citizen of Vietnam, then allegedly used the data to send ‘spam’ to tens of millions of email recipients. The data breach was the largest in U.S. history and was the subject of a Congressional inquiry in June 2011. (Source: U.S. Department of Justice)