DOJ confirms arrested US Army soldier linked to AT&T and Verizon hacks

U.S. prosecutors formally linked the December arrest of a serving U.S. Army soldier to the massive theft of U.S. phone records from AT&T and Verizon last year.

Authorities arrested US Army communications specialist Cameron John Wagenius in Texas on December 20. A brief two-page grand jury indictment The US military has been charged with two counts of illegally releasing classified phone records. Wagenius was later extradited to Washington state.

In a new court filing on Friday, US prosecutors confirmed that the charges against Wagenius are related to the previous indictment of two hackers, Connor Moucka and John Binns, who were indicted by the US government. multiple interventions at cloud computing company Snowflake saw data stored on customer accounts being stolen en masse. Snowflake customers whose data was stolen include AT&T, which had “almost all” of its customer calls unaccounted for by Snowflake by 2024, and Verizon, where a significant portion of its customer call records were taken.

US Attorney Tessa Gorman told the Seattle court that “both cases arise out of the same computer intrusion and extortion and involve some information about the same abducted victim,” and that, therefore, “these cases are based on overlapping evidentiary material and legal process and arguably present common questions of law and fact.” does.”

This is the first public acknowledgment by prosecutors that Wagenius’ charges are related to last year’s breach at cloud computing company Snowflake. Security journalist Brian Krebs first reported on the link Between the Wagenius and Snowflake hacks in November and reported later Arrest of Wagenius.

The Snowflake account hack was one of the most widespread cyberattacks of the past year. AT&T, Credit tree, Santander Bank, Ticket masterand at least 160 other companies. Hackers have allegedly stolen large banks of personally identifiable and sensitive corporate data that companies store on Snowflake. Using passwords stolen from employees’ computers with malware. Most affected Snowflake customers were not using multifactor protection, which Snowflake did not require its customers to do at the time.

According to Krebs’s report, about it Moucka’s earlier arrest by Canadian authoritiesWagenius claimed in a post on a prominent cybercrime forum that he had access to the call records of Vice President Kamala Harris and then-President-elect Donald Trump, and threatened to leak all the stolen files unless Moucka was released.

Prosecutors accuse the Snowflake hackers of stealing information including personal information, cellphone and IMEI numbers, dates of birth, postal and email addresses, passwords, Social Security numbers, government-issued identification numbers, as well as payment card and bank account numbers.

An arrest warrant was issued for Wagenius on January 8, and he was found in a Washington state jail.