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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Hacker Gets Two Years

TULSA (CN) - A leader of the Team Digi7al hacker group was sentenced Wednesday to two years in federal prison for targeting 50 military, university and business computer systems to steal thousands of identities.

Daniel Trenton Krueger, 20, of Dix, Ill., was sentenced by U.S. District Judge James H. Payne.

Krueger faced up to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty in May to a one-count information .

His co-defendant, former Navy enlistee Nicholas Paul Knight, 27, of Chantilly, Va., pleaded guilty at the same time.

Knight was a systems administrator in the nuclear reactor department of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman at the time of the hackings. He will be sentenced on Nov. 21.

Prosecutors said Knight, Krueger and other group members posted on Twitter links to information stolen from the Navy's Smart Move database in Tulsa in June 2012. The database holds names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of 220,000 service members.

Other hacking victims include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stanford University, the World Health Organization, Kawasaki, and Autotrader.com.

At least three minors and a Canadian citizen coordinated the group's hacks by email, IRC chat and Facebook private messages, prosecutors said.

Knight told Krueger in one message: "if anything happens ... send me a message saying goodbye so we know one of us is caught," prosecutors said.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service's cyber investigators monitored Knight as he hacked into a fake database while aboard the aircraft carrier. A sting was then conducted after Knight was found to be accessing the group's Twitter account from within the Navy's network. CIS and Defense Criminal Investigative Service agents were then able to identify both Knight and Krueger, prosecutors said Wednesday.

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