Idaho Man Gets 10 Years for Hacking, Cyber Extortion

Robert Purbeck, 45, acquired a 10-year jail sentence for hacking into 19 laptop servers throughout the US, stealing the personally identifiable information (PII) of 132,000 individuals, trying to extort an orthodontist in alternate for Bitcoin, and threatening to make public the affected person data he stole.

In 2017, Purbeck bought entry to a medical clinic’s laptop server on a cybercriminal market. Utilizing these stolen credentials, he accessed the clinic’s computer systems and downloaded data for greater than 43,000 people that included names, addresses, birthdates, and Social Safety numbers.

Practically a yr later, Purbeck bought credentials on the Darkish Internet for a police division server in Newnan, Ga., stealing paperwork, police studies, and delicate info of over 14,000 individuals.

And in July 2018, Purbeck threatened an orthodontist he’d stolen knowledge from, demanding a ransom in Bitcoin. He additionally threatened to promote the PII of the orthodontist’s baby, harassing the orthodontist and his sufferers with threatening emails and messages.

The FBI in the end executed a federal search warrant at Purbeck’s dwelling in 2019, seizing his computer systems and gadgets. Earlier this yr, he pleaded guilty to 2 counts of “deliberately accessing and acquiring info from a protected laptop with out authorization.”

Alongside his jail sentence, Purbeck was ordered to serve three years of supervised launch in addition to pay $1,048,702 in restitution to his victims.