After a year of investigating who was behind the massive attack on JP Morgan, the largest bank in the United States, the Justice Department is now assigning responsibility.
Gery Shalon, Joshua Samuel Aaron and Ziv Orenstein are accused of involvement in a criminal act against the government and against innocent American citizens. The defendants stole at least one hundred million dollars!
Salon and Orenstein are both citizens and residents of Israel, unlike American Aaron, who has apparently lived in America, Russia, and Israel in recent years.
The twenty-three charges against them describe attacks on various businesses, and it appears that the first victim is JP Morgan. Among others are Dow Jones, Scottrade and E-trade.
According to the US Department of Justice, from 2012 to mid-2015, Aaron and Shalon worked with other hackers who dealt with the personal information and financial data of 100 million victims! The largest victim was the bank JP Morgan, they managed to steal information from millions of its customers in August 2014.
When JP Morgan released the data, it became known that among the victims were 76 million individuals and 7 million businesses.
The attack on JP Morgan was no easy feat. The indictment alleged that the attackers used at least 75 shell companies around the world to launder and manage profits.
The Department of Justice provided information about the defendants' actions. One important note is that Shalon made limited use of the Heartbleed bug in April 2014. In addition, this vulnerability, which was a flaw in the open-source Open SSL library, was first disclosed on April 7, 2014.
In April 2014, Shalon and his co-conspirators illegally hacked into the victim’s network, exploiting the “Heartbleed” vulnerability, which at the time had been identified as a previously undetected security vulnerability that existed largely in computer network servers, the indictment states. While they were able to gain access to the victim’s network, shortly thereafter, the victim became aware of and patched the Heartbleed vulnerability in his system.
The names of Shalon, Orestein and Aaron were first made public in July in an FBI. The investigation was related to a money laundering scheme. (Bitcoin) At the same time, there was speculation by MMM that the arrested were related to the wiretapping case, although there was no official confirmation.
Attorney Preet Bharara called the attacks “professional-level hacking.”
Ultimately, the defendants made millions of dollars from the aforementioned criminal acts. This particular case marks the most sophisticated and “smartest way” ever used to intercept information.
