NullCrew Hacker Gets 45-Month Jail Term

Timothy Justen French, 22, of Morristown, Tenn., was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison Tuesday for cyberattacks against companies, universities, and government institutions that caused at least $792,000 in financial loss to victims. As part of a hacking group called NullCrew, French was responsible for seven such attacks between 2012 and 2014, including attacks on a Canadian telecom company and a US state government.

A US Department of Justice (DoJ) release says French exploited vulnerabilities in his victims’ computers then “disseminated online the usernames, email accounts, and passwords for thousands of individuals, which not only violated their privacy and sense of online security, it exposed them to financial fraud and identity theft.”

French, whose targets were spread worldwide, went by aliases like “Orbit” and “crysis” and used Twitter to boast of his attacks, says the DoJ.

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