A U.S. judge on Tuesday sentenced Yevgeniy Nikulin to seven years in prison, ending an international legal drama that has embroiled three countries over the course of eight years. Prosecutors had recommended a sentence of 12 years for the defendant.
Nikulin, 33, was found guilty in July of the 2012 LinkedIn and Formspring that stole the credentials of 117 million Americans. He was charged in 2016 with hacking into computers and stealing usernames and passwords from American citizens. He then tried to sell them to other members of a Russian-language hacking forum.
Nikulin has been in prison for almost 48 months, his lawyer said.
During the hearing, Nikulin's lawyer argued that the proposed sentence was based on the loss of data from LinkedIn and other hacking victims and was not based on reality. None of the 100 million victims came forward to say that the theft of data had harmed them financially. The reported losses of millions of dollars were also overstated, Gasner said.
In the trial, which was suspended for weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, prosecutors described Nikulin as a digital version of a common thief who simply stole vast amounts of information. Defense lawyers, meanwhile, argued that a different perpetrator, perhaps a government hacker, was behind the crime. But in the end, Nikulin was convicted.
Judge Alsup of the Northern District of California repeatedly tried to speed up the trial, reminding government prosecutors that Nikulin has been in prison for years.
The case highlighted how the defendants carried out their attacks and how Russian intelligence knew exactly what they were doing. During that year, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a dossier of other court documents accusing other Russian men of involvement in Nikulin’s scheme to traffic stolen credentials.
Czech law enforcement initially arrested Nikulin in 2016 and then extradited him to the U.S. after the Russian government filed its own extradition request. The case was among several criminal charges since then accusing several Russian men of a range of cybercrimes. All of this led a Russian lawmaker to complain that U.S. police are “hunting Russian citizens” around the world.
