Dive Brief:
- U.S. prosecutors said three men were arrested on Monday for engaging in a broad hacking and spamming scheme, Reuters reports.
- The scheme targeted the personal information of 60 million people, including Comcast customers.
- The indictment says the trio targeted multiple companies and compromised tens of thousands of peoples' email accounts, which they then used to send spam.
Dive Insight:
Timothy Livingston, 30, Tomasz Chmielarz, 32, and Devin McArthur, 27, were named in an indictment filed in federal court in Newark, New Jersey. The men were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and other offenses.
One scheme targeted a telecommunications company that employed McArthur, believed to be Comcast, who installed hacking tools in company networks to gain access to records for 50 million people, prosecutors said. Other companies targeted included a New York-based technology and consulting company and a Texas-based credit monitoring firm.
When law enforcement seized Livingston's computer in July, they found a database with 7 million of the Texas-based credit monitoring firm’s records.