Last Updated on 22/11/2021 by Anamika
A Michigan man was sentenced to seven years in prison for hacking into a human resources database at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, collecting over 65,000 employees’ personal information, and then selling it online.
The man, named, Justin Johnson, received maximum sentence by Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Hornak. He previously pleaded guilty to two of the 43 counts against him — one count of conspiracy and one count of aggravated identity theft.
Johnson has a lot of names in the darb web industry, such as “The Dearth Star” or “Dearthy Star” got this sentence because he hacked into the UPMC human resource server databases in 2013 and 2014 and reportedly stole personal and sensitive information of tens of thousands of employees.
Johnson then sold the stolen information on dark web forums for use by other criminals, who allegedly filed hundreds of false U.S. individual income tax returns in 2014 using UPMC employee personal information to get tax benefits.
According to the reports of KTVU, “Justin Johnson stole the names, Social Security numbers, addresses and salary information of tens of thousands of UPMC employees, then sold that personal information on the dark web so that other criminals could further exploit his victims,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Kaufman in a statement. “Today’s sentence sends a deterrent message that hacking has serious consequences.”
Reportedly, Johnson was arrested last year in Detroit and he will be given the toughest punishment because the crime that he has committed will be going to have inverse impacts on lives of innocent people for long time.
