[ad]<\/p>\n
Good I say, nothing worse than a spammer.<\/p>\n
A bulk e-mailer who looted more than a billion records with personal information from a data warehouse has been sentenced to eight years in prison, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Scott Levine, 46, was sentenced by a federal judge in Little Rock, Ark., after being found guilty of breaking into Acxiom’s servers and downloading gigabytes of data in what the U.S. Justice Department calls one of the largest data heists to date. Acxiom, based in Little Rock, says it operates the world’s largest repository of consumer data, and counts major banks, credit card companies and the U.S. government among its customers.<\/p>\n
In August 2005, a jury convicted Levine, a native of Boca Raton, Fla., and former chief executive of a bulk e-mail company called Snipermail.com, of 120 counts of unauthorized access to a computer connected to the Internet. The U.S. government says, however, there was no evidence that Levine used the data for identity fraud. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Looks like for some reason the FTP had access to the SAM file, or a copy of it, and this ‘hacker’ downloaded it then brute forced the hashes.<\/p>\n