Brandon Charles Glover Pleads Guilty After Extorting Uber and LinkedIn | October 30

San Jose: Brandon Charles Glover and Vasile Mereacre pleaded guilty in federal court today to their respective roles in an extortion conspiracy involving a plot to extract bounties from victim corporations in exchange for the defendants’ promise to delete stolen confidential data.

According to reports, the defendants admitted making extortion demands of several victim corporations including Uber and LinkedIn.

The men admitted that from October 2016 through January 2017, they engaged in a conspiracy to use stolen credentials to gain access to confidential corporate databases being stored on Amazon Web Services that were owned by the victims.

To induce payments, the defendants used an alias and an encrypted email account to contact the victim corporations and report that their data was vulnerable. The defendants sent a sample of the stolen data to the corporations as proof their systems had been breached and then demanded payment in exchange for deletion of the data.

The hacker identified archive files that contained 57 million Uber user records consisting of customer data and driver data. Uber agreed to pay $100,000 in bitcoin to the defendants through a third party but that, as part of the agreement, Uber demanded that the defendants also sign a confidentiality agreement.

Brandon Charles Glover and Mereacre both were charged by a Superseding Information on October 30, 2019.  Each defendant was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit extortion involving computers.

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