The guy who knew Nintendo’s Switch surprise ahead of time has pled guilty to hacking

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

A California man has pled guilty to hacking Nintendo’s servers to steal confidential files, including taking information about the Nintendo Switch months before it was announced, the US Department of Justice revealed today.

According to the DOJ, Ryan Hernandez, 21, and an associate phished a Nintendo employee in 2016 to get access to and steal confidential information from the company. In October 2017, the FBI contacted Hernandez and his parents to ask him to stop hacking, at which time Hernandez “confirmed that he understood the consequences of any future hacking.”

However, from at least June 2018 to June 2019, Hernandez continued to illegally access confidential corporate information, according to the DOJ, and he broke into “multiple Nintendo servers” to steal more confidential information.

Hernandez apparently boasted about his hacking on Twitter, Discord, and his own chat forum called “Ryan’s Underground Hangout.” On that forum, he chatted with others about Nintendo products, including discussing some of the confidential information he had found from hacking, and shared vulnerabilities in Nintendo’s network, according to the DOJ. The FBI raided Hernandez’s home in June 2019 and found “thousands of confidential Nintendo files.”

Hernandez was also charged with possession of child pornography. The DOJ says Hernandez has already agreed to pay $259,323 in restitution costs to Nintendo as part of a plea agreement. Hernandez’s full sentence will be determined by a judge, which the DOJ says could be up to five years in prison for hacking and up to 20 years in prison for possessing child pornography.

You can read the full indictment here:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Retailers are scrambling to find trucks amid the pandemic, generating record-smashing pay for drivers

Image
Truck drivers have fled the industry, but those who have stuck around are seeing red-hot rates. Glenn Koenig/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images A shortage of truck drivers combined with a surge in online and in-store shopping has made trucking unusually expensive.  Retailers are spending around 30% more than they did last year to move goods via truck.  The last time trucking rates soared this high, it forced companies like Amazon and XYZ to pass down the unusual transportation costs to consumers by raising prices.  Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .   There's a reason the shelves at your local big-box retailer still looks barren, months after the coronavirus crisis forced manufacturers and retailers to pump out more toilet paper and cleaning supplies than ever.  Tens of thousands — potentially hundreds of thousands — of truck drivers have left the industry since early 2019, experts say, leaving retailers scrambling to fill shelves and online orders
Read more

What Facebook doesn’t understand about the Facebook walkout

Image
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge I. The CEO On Friday afternoon, Facebook made one of its most controversial content moderation decisions in company history. After President Trump posted to Facebook some tweets that Twitter had placed behind a warning for “glorifying violence,” Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would allow them to stand . “I know many people are upset that we’ve left the President’s posts up,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post , “but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies.” “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump had tweeted — quoting a former Miami police chief who, in 1967, called for a violent crackdown on the city’s black community. And just as the president suggested, a long weekend of violence followed in the United States, with police assaulting protesters and bystanders across the country in the days that fo
Read more

Woodward claims he sat on Trump coronavirus remarks for 6 months in order to do more fact checking

Image
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 11: Bob Woodward speaks with Dana Perino at "The Daily Briefing" at Fox News Channel Studios on September 11, 2018 in New York City. Dominik Bindl/Getty Images Bob Woodward is defending his decision to withhold President Trump's remarks about COVID-19 until the release of his new book. In public, Trump was downplaying the threat of the coronavirus, even suggesting it was a new "hoax" from Democrats to harm his presidency. In a conversation with Woodward, however, Trump contradicted his public remarks, noting that the virus is far more dangerous than the seasonal flu. In an interview with the Associated Press, Woodward claimed that he sat on the comment for more than six months in order to do more fact-checking. “He tells me this, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, but is it true?’ Trump says things that don’t check out, right?” Woodward said. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories . President Trump kn
Read more