Arraignment in Cyber Attack on L.A. County Court Computers

Arraignment in Cyber Attack on L.A. County Court Computers

by Contributing Editor

A 33-year-old man is expected to plead not guilty Friday to multiple federal counts of hacking into the Los Angeles County court computer system, allegedly to steal the personal information of employees.

Oriyomi Sadiq Aloba of Houston, Texas, faces charges of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, unauthorized access to obtain information, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for an alleged “multi-stage phishing attack” on Superior Court computers, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to the indictment, over the course of a week in late July 2017, Aloba allegedly used the stolen username and passwords of multiple court employees to log into the system’s servers and send phishing e-mails to e-mail addresses outside the county system, as well as to send test e-mails to himself to test the security features and ensure full access to the account.

The e-mails included a message purporting to be a communication from American Express that led to a web page asking potential victims to provide their passwords, personal identifying information and credit card information, the indictment alleges.

The link for the fake American Express website allegedly used a code that led to Aloba’s account as the delivery address for the information that the victims entered into the website, federal prosecutors said.

Aloba allegedly accessed at least 18 different court employee accounts and sent out roughly 2 million phishing e-mails. If found guilty as charged, he would face more than 17 years in federal prison, prosecutors said.

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All credit goes to Contributing Editor
Originally published on https://mynewsla.com