LOS ANGELES – A suburban Houston resident has been found guilty by a jury of 27 federal criminal charges for hacking into the Los Angeles Superior Court computer system and then using it to send approximately 2 million malicious phishing emails.
Oriyomi Sadiq Aloba, 33, of Katy, Texas, was found guilty late Thursday afternoon after a three-day trial. The jury found Aloba guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud, one count of attempted wire fraud, one count of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, five counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, and four counts of aggravated identity theft. Aloba was taken into federal custody immediately after the verdict was read.
According to the evidence presented at trial, in July 2017, Aloba and his co-conspirators targeted the Los Angeles Superior Court for a phishing attack. During the attack, one court employee’s email account was compromised and sent an email – without her authorization – to co-workers purporting to be from the file hosting service Dropbox. In fact, it was a phishing email that contained a link to a phishing website that asked for the users’ Superior Court email addresses and passwords, court papers state.(read the rest here)
