Former Yahoo Engineer Hacked Accounts For User Porn

A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty in a US federal court of hacking into 6,000 personal Yahoo accounts, including his friends and workmates.

Reyes Daniel Ruiz, 34, entered the guilty plea in San Jose this week, after he had been accused of hacking into thousands of Yahoo accounts through his work at the company, in an attempt to find sexual images and videos from the account holders.

According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, these were accounts primarily belonging to younger women.

Porn hunt

Ruiz used his role as a software engineer at the firm to crack user passwords, which allowed him to access internal Yahoo systems to compromise the Yahoo accounts.

Ruiz admitted to making copies of images and videos that he found in the personal accounts without permission, and stored the data at his home.

And to make matters worse, once he had access to the Yahoo accounts, Ruiz admitted to compromising the iCloud, Facebook, Gmail, DropBox, and other online accounts of the Yahoo users in search of more private images and videos.

But when Yahoo became aware of the suspicious account activity, Ruiz apparently admitted to destroying the computer and hard drive on which he had stored the images.

Ruiz of Tracy, California, had been charged with one count of Computer Intrusion, and one count of Interception of a Wire Communication.

Under the plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to the count of Computer Intrusion.

Ruiz is currently on release thanks to a $200,000 bond.

But he is due to be sentenced at a hearing on 3 February 2020, where he could receive the maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

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