A 28-year-old Ukrainian man pleaded guilty May 16 in federal court in New Jersey to hacking Marketwired, PR Newswire and Business Wire and stealing confidential information from press releases in a conspiracy to reap $30M in profits.
Vadym Iermolovych copped to a charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and aggravated identity theft in the ring, which conspired to swipe 150,000 press releases and the sensistive information they contained. He was arrested in November 2014 on other charges related to computer hacking and credit card fraud, the US Attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, said. He faces up to 27 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Iermolovych and co-conspirators stole press releases with information about earnings, gross margins and other material information, authorities said. They then shared the stolen information with traders via overseas computer servers.
Iermolovych admitted to hacking PR Newswire in 2013 with a set of user credentials of PRN employees he obtained from hacking a social networking website. He said he sold press releases stolen from his Marketwired hack, and he bought access into Business Wire networks, as well.
Two of five others involved in the conspiracy were charged earlier this year.
The US Attorney said the Eastern District of New York has handed down a related indictment of four securities traders, one of whom pleaded guilty to wire fraud in December.
Authorities said the traders created "shopping lists" for the hackers of information from publicly traded companies.
Iermolovych will be sentenced August 22.
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