Who was convicted for the 2012 LinkedIn hack?

Yevgeniy Nikulin was convicted for the 2012 LinkedIn hack.

The breach occurred on June 5, 2012, when passwords from nearly 6.5 million LinkedIn accounts were stolen. LinkedIn initially invalidated compromised passwords and urged users to reset them. In 2016, the company reported that an additional 100 million email addresses and hashed passwords appeared to come from the same incident.

Nikulin, a Russian national, was arrested by Czech police in Prague on October 5, 2016, after the United States sought him through an international warrant. U.S. prosecutors accused him of stealing a LinkedIn employee’s credentials and using them to enter the company’s network. The case also involved alleged intrusions affecting Dropbox and Formspring.

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Nikulin in July 2020 on most of the charges. He was sentenced to 88 months in prison in September 2020. The case is often confused with other famous hacking prosecutions, but those individuals were not the person convicted in this LinkedIn case.