The Department of Justice confirms that the arrested US soldier is linked to the AT&T and Verizon hacks
US prosecutors have officially linked the arrest of a serving US soldier last December to a massive theft of US phone records from AT&T and Verizon last year.
Authorities arrested Cameron John Wagenius, a US Army communications specialist, in Texas on December 20. A two-page summary indictment for the grand jury The US soldier was charged with two counts of illegally transferring secret phone records. Wagenius was later extradited to Washington state.
In a new court filing on Friday, US prosecutors confirmed that the charges against Wagenius are linked to a previous indictment of two alleged hackers, Connor Moka and John Baines, who the US government accuses of Multiple interventions in cloud computing company Snowflake Which witnessed the mass theft of data stored in its customers’ accounts. Snowflake customers whose data was stolen include AT&T, which had “almost all” of its customer call logs through 2024 leaked from its Snowflake account, and Verizon, from which a large amount of customer call logs were taken.
American lawyer Tessa Gorman He told the Seattle court that “both cases arose from the same computer hacking and extortion and involved some of the same stolen victim information,” and as such, “these two cases rely on overlapping evidentiary material and legal procedures and arguably pose common questions about the law and fact.”
This is the first public acknowledgment by prosecutors that Wagenius’ charges are linked to violations last year at cloud computing company Snowflake. Security journalist Brian Krebs First mentioned at the link Between Wagenius and Snowflake hacks in November, and He later broke the news Vagenius arrested.
The Snowflake account hacks became one of the most widespread cyberattacks last year, affecting everyone AT&T, LendingTree, Santander Bank, Ticket managerAnd at least 160 other companies. The hackers allegedly stole huge banks of sensitive and personal corporate data that the companies had stored in Snowflake, in part by Using passwords stolen from employee computers that contain malware. Most of Snowflake’s affected customers were not using multi-factor protection, which Snowflake did not require of its customers at the time.
According to Krebs reports, after Mocha was arrested earlier by Canadian authoritiesWagenius claimed in a post on a well-known cybercrime forum to have access to call logs of Vice President Kamala Harris and then-President-elect Donald Trump, and threatened to leak all the stolen files unless Mocha was released.
Prosecutors accuse the Snowflake hackers of stealing data that includes personal information, cell phone numbers, IMEI numbers, dates of birth, postal and email addresses, passwords, Social Security numbers and government-issued ID numbers, as well as payment card and bank account numbers.
A detention order was issued for Vagenius on January 8, and he is believed to be in custody in Washington state.
