The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Moldovan Sandu Boris Diaconu has been given a 42-month imprisonment sentence months after pleading guilty to charges related to his leadership of cybercrime market E-Root Marketplace, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.
Over 350,000 compromised credentials have been peddled in the E-Root Marketplace, which not only enabled credential searches based on assigned parameters but also obfuscated admin, buyer, and seller identities, according to court documents.
Further investigation into the hacked credentials revealed utilization in ransomware attacks and associations with tax fraud schemes involving stolen identities. Online payment system Perfect Money had also been leveraged by the E-Root Marketplace to conceal transactions before having its domain names and illicit crypto exchange service sequestered by U.S. law enforcement in 2020. Meanwhile, Diaconu had been arrested in May 2021 before being subjected to U.S. extradition last October.
