The Department of Justice trumpeted the guilty pleas today as part of the unsealing of an indictment against four of the alleged hackers (the full text of the indictment is embedded below). The four men are considered to have operated in concert with the Australian hacker SuperDaE, whose claims of having hacked the aforementioned gaming companies—and others —were chronicled on Kotaku in February 2013.
The various hacking schemes stretched back to January 2011, according to the DoJ, and involve everything from the theft of the game Gears of War 3 nearly a year before its official release to the allegedly successful effort to sell a counterfeit pre-release Xbox One development kit on eBay for $5,000.
Some of the charges square with the elaborate details that SuperDaE himself shared withKotaku last year. Others are new. Some are covered in plea deals to conspiracy charges by two of the alleged hackers, Canadian David Pokora and American Sanadodeh Nesheiwat. Others are simply alleged at this moment, with the remaining suspects innocent until proven guilty. SuperDaE, for his part, hasn't been charged by American authorities but is under investigationby Australian law enforcement.
A 65-page indictment outlines 18 counts ranging from conspiracy and wire fraud charges to mail fraud and identity theft against the four North American hackers and SuperDaE, whose real name was redacted from the indictment. The hackers, whose ages range from 18-28, are alleged to have used a combination of Structured Query Language "injection attacks" and stolen developer login credentials obtained from those attacks. They are said to have used the login info to gain early access to unreleased game and hardware code as well as credit card information and various login credentials for scores of game developers—as many as 16,000 if one of the alleged hacker's boasts was true.
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