WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Two Vietnamese citizens and a Canadian national were charged for making millions of dollars based on stolen e-mails in what amounts to be the largest Internet data breach ever in the United States, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a press release on Friday.
“These men — operating from Vietnam, the Netherlands, and Canada — are accused of carrying out the largest data breach of names and email addresses in the history of the Internet,” US Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said in the press release.
On Thursday, the DOJ unsealed an indictment against the two Vietnamese citizens Viet Quoc Nguyen and Giang Hoang Vu for their roles in hacking at least eight e-mail service providers throughout the United States, and stealing confidential information.
The hackers, who resided in the Netherlands, used the data to send “spam” to tens of millions of email recipients, according to the press release.
In addition, a US federal grand jury returned an indictment this week against a Canadian citizen David-Manuel Santos Da Silva for conspiracy to commit money laundering, and for helping Nguyen and Vu generate revenue from the “spam.”
The data breach was the largest in US history and was the subject of a Congressional inquiry in June 2011, the report said.
