A 29-year-old man from Arizona, Jonathan Powell hacked into more than 1,000 student email accounts at two universities and also he attempted to do the same at more than 75 other universities across the United States. Later on November 2nd (Wednesday) he was arrested for this act based on a criminal complaint and charged with one count of fraud in connection with computers.
And this is not all, he used the email accounts he hacked and tried accessing social media and other online accounts of students which linked to the compromised account including Apple iCloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Yahoo.
According to the officials he also searched their photos for potentially embarrassing content, he have searched a New York-based university student’s linked Gmail account for digital photographs using the key terms such as “naked” and “horny”.
“This case should serve as a wake up call for universities and educational institutions around the country. There is no greater threat to our security and personal privacy than the cyber threat, and hackers must be identified, stopped, and punished”, said Preet Bharara ,Manhattan US attorney.
Powell allegedly used password reset tools from his work place to hack all these accounts.It is also found he had accessed the password reset tool around 18,640 times between October 2015 and September 2016. He also attempted around 18,600 password changes in connection with over 2,000 university email accounts and successfully managed to change the passwords for over 1,000 accounts.