Moldovan national Sandu Boris Diaconu has been sentenced to 42 months in prison for operating E-Root, a major online marketplace that sold access to hacked computers worldwide.
According to court documents, after the federal prison ends, Diaconu will also be under supervised release for another 3 years.
The sentence comes after his December guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit access device and computer fraud and four counts of possessing 15 or more unauthorized access devices.
Diaconu attempted to flee but was arrested in the U.K. in May 2021 after E-Root's domains were seized by authorities in late 2020.
In October 2023, he was extradited to the United States under charges of wire fraud, money laundering, computer fraud, and access device fraud.
Diaconu was an administrator of the E-Root Marketplace between January 2015 and February 2020.
This cybercrime market operated across a sprawling network infrastructure and was designed to shield the identities of its administrators, buyers, and sellers.
Using this platform, buyers could search for RDP and SSH credentials to compromised computer systems, which could be filtered by various criteria, including price, geographic location, internet service provider, and operating system.
Cybercriminals later used the compromised credentials to gain remote unauthorized access to victims' systems and extract or manipulate data.
The E-Root marketplace transactions also used an online payment system dubbed Perfect Money to obfuscate the payment chain.
E-Root provided an illicit cryptocurrency exchange service designed to convert Bitcoin, U.S. dollars, and other currencies to Perfect Money and vice versa, a service that has also been seized.
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This Cyber News was published on www.bleepingcomputer.com. Publication date: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:11:27 +0000