5 Arrested in JPMorgan 2014 Hacking Case; Nearly 83 Million People Affected

It's always a good day for us when we awaken to the news that law enforcement has brought perpetrators to justice for hacking activities. Today, with fulfillment in the hearts of nearly 83 million people affected by a recent JPMorgan hacking case, U.S. law enforcement officials arrest five individuals allegedly responsible for the attack.

Back in 2014 JPMorgan was the target of hackers stealing the login credentials of a JPMorgan employee leading to access of 90 of the company's servers. The hackers were able to steal subsequently the details of about 76 million households and nearly 7 million businesses – 83 million people in all. According to JPMorgan, at the time, no financial information was compromised even with the multi-system access granted by the hacker's efforts.

The FBI has been on the case of tracking down the hackers responsible for the JPMorgan attack, which has just now resulted the arrest of 3 individuals for stock manipulation and another two arrested for running an illegal Bitcoin exchange. The connection to the hacking of JPMorgan and the arrest of the five individuals isn't initially clear-cut but sources from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal verified that the same perpetrators are people of interest in the FBI's JPMorgan attack investigation.

We know very well how hacking incidents such as the JPMorgan case results in personal data being exposed and potentially sold to the heist bidding hacker over the internet. With JPMorgan's servers being accessed by hackers, data compromised was later used for the exploitation of many individual records obtained through the initial attack. Those attacks allowed the hackers to ultimately launch Bitcoin exchanges and stock manipulation schemes.

Before their arrest, the attackers Israeli citizens Gery Shalon, Ziv Orenstein, and U.S. citizen Joshua Samuel Aaron, were eventually able to attack other banks through some of the same methods used to compromise information on JPMorgan servers. The schemed utilized in the stock manipulation was found to be a classic pump-and-dump operation, which artificially raised the price of low-volume stocks and then sell them at an inflated price to unsuspecting buyers. One of the primary methods used to attack the buyers was through spam email messages.

In the Bitcoin exchange scheme, the arrested hackers Yuri Lebedev and Anthony Murgio were trading more than $1.8 million worth of Bitcoin on behalf of tens of thousands of clients. In those transactions, the hackers naturally utilized illegal money laundering methods, which led the FBI down a direct course of bringing these hackers to justice.