The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington announced a member of a hacking group that caused more than $1 billion of financial damage has been sentenced to five years in prison.
According to an April 7 Department of Justice news release, Denys Iarmak, 32, of Ukraine, was sentenced to five years in prison for his actions as part of hacking group FIN7 that compromised more than 20 million debit and credit cards. Iarmak was reportedly involved in a hacking campaign November 2016-18 that breached the computer security of businesses in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Colombia.
“Iarmak and his conspirators compromised millions of financial accounts, causing over a billion dollars in losses to Americans and costs to America’s economy,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said, according to the release. “Protecting businesses – both large and small – online is a top priority for the Department of Justice. We are committed to working with our international partners to hold such cyber criminals accountable, no matter where they live or how anonymous they think they are.”
Iarmak was arrested in November 2019 in Thailand by local authorities at the request of U.S. authorities, the release reported. He resisted extradition, but in February 2020 he consented to being extradited to the U.S. Iarmak pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking.
“Mr. Iarmak was directly involved in designing phishing emails embedded with malware, intruding on victim networks and extracting data such as payment card information,” said U.S. Attorney Nicholas W. Brown in the release. “To make matters worse, he continued his work with the FIN7 criminal enterprise even after the arrests and prosecution of co-conspirators. He and others in this cybercrime group used hacking techniques to essentially rob thousands of locations of multiple restaurant chains at once, from the comfort and safety of their keyboards in distant countries.”
So far three members of FIN7, including Iarmak, have been arrested for their crimes, according to the news release.
