12 years in prison for man who hacked Nasdaq, helped swipe 160M credit cards

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Two Russian men convicted of their involvement in a massive hack of the Nasdaq stock exchange, Citibank, and other major companies have been given hefty sentences.

The two men, Vladimir Drinkman and Dmitriy Smilianets, pleaded guilty in 2015. On Wednesday, Drinkman was sentenced to 144 months, while Smilianets was given 51 months.

Back in 2013, five men were indicted on federal charges. They were accused of, among other things, trading text strings that exploited SQL-injection vulnerabilities in the victim companies' websites to obtain login credentials and other sensitive data and installing malware that gave them persistent backdoor access to the networks. The breaches resulted in losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars via fraudulent ATM withdrawals. The scheme lasted from 2005 until 2012.

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