Recently, we renewed our countdown of the FBI’s 10 most wanted black-hat hackers. First up was Bezhad Mesri at number 10. He is accused of having compromised Home Box Office (HBO) employees’ emails and abused that access to steal data, extort the company for ransom, and leak the information online when he didn’t get his way.

This week, we present No. 9 and No. 8: Viet Quoc Nguyen and nine individuals collectively known as the “JabberZeus” suspects.

#9 – Viet Quoc Nguyen

Beginning around February 2009, Viet Quoc Nguyen a/k/a “Vandehiu” a/k/a “Peter Nguyen” partnered with Giang Hoang Vu a/k/a “Lee Vu” and others to defraud at least eight different email service providers (ESPs) and to send spam mail to numerous individual recipients.

Nguyen and Vu’s malicious scheme began when they acquired crypters, covert monitoring tools, and malware. The two black-hat hackers then launched phishing email attacks against some of their targeted ESPs. Those campaigns delivered malware, thereby allowing Nguyen and Vu to access victimized employees’ computers in order to steal credentials for their employer’s systems.

The stolen information laid the foundation for Nguyen and Vu to access the ESPs’ systems and steal confidential information including tens of millions of customers’ email addresses. In other cases, they abused that access to launch phishing attacks against other ESPs’ employees in order to infiltrate those companies’ systems. Sometimes they even leveraged the email addresses they stole to conduct spam mail campaigns leading to Nguyen’s affiliate-marketing websites.

For his alleged crimes, a federal grand jury charged Nguyen with 29 counts including wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and other offenses. It wasn’t long after that the United States District Court in the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta, Georgia issued a federal warrant for his arrest on 3 October 2012.

Nguyen is known to (Read more...)