Five people were indicted in federal court in New York on Tuesday in connection with the cyberattack on JP Morgan Chase & Co. last October that exposed about 83 million bank accounts, the Wall Street Journal reported.
JP Morgan officials have been claiming since last year that the Russian government was behind the attack, but the FBI arrests showed otherwise. Regardless, the attack has gone down in history as one of the largest breaches of a U.S. bank.
Three of the individuals were arrested on charges of stock price manipulation, while the other two were charged with operating an unlicensed Bitcoin exchange. Neither charge appears to be directly related to last year's attack, but US officials confirm there is a connection.
The defendants were identified after an FBI investigation uncovered evidence linking them to the JP Morgan hack, as well as similar incidents that occurred at Fidelity Investments Ltd. and E*Trade Financial Corp.
Gery Shalon and Ziv Orenstein were arrested in Israel on Tuesday, while Joshua Samuel Aaron, a US citizen living in Russia, remains at large.
Yuri Lebedev and Anthony Murgio were arrested in Florida on the same day, because they were administrators of a Bitcoin exchange called Coin.mx.
