A former Yahoo software engineer pleaded guilty to hacking into thousands of accounts in search of private and personal records.
Reyes Daniel Ruiz admitted on Monday that, during his nearly 11-year tenure with the web portal, he illegally copied sexual images and videos from some 6,000 users.
The 34-year-old worked his way up the Yahoo ranks, first as an operations center engineer, then mail site reliability engineer, and, finally, senior production engineer.
Testing the limits of his staff power, Ruiz apparently cracked passwords and accessed internal Yahoo systems to compromise the accounts of young women—including his friends and colleagues.
He then made copies of personal content without permission, storing the data on a hard drive at his home.
Ruiz also confessed to infiltrating iCloud, Facebook, Gmail, Dropbox, and other online accounts for which victims registered with their Yahoo email address.
When his employer caught on to the suspicious behavior, he destroyed the computer and hard drive that housed the stolen documents.
Yahoo reported the engineer to U.S. law enforcement, and after an investigation by the FBI, Ruiz was formally charged in April.
Currently released under a $200,000 bond, Ruiz pleaded guilty this week to one count of computer intrusion. He now faces a maximum prison term of five years and a fine up to $250,000.
His sentencing is scheduled for February 2020 in San Jose.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Ruiz left Yahoo in July 2018, and is currently working as a senior site reliability engineer at Okta, a Silicon Valley tech firm that specializes in single sign-on (SSO) solutions.
Neither Yahoo nor Okta immediately responded to Geek’s request for comment.
More on Geek.com:
- 1 Billion Yahoo Users Exposed in Second Record-Breaking Hack
- Yahoo Says Data From Half a Billion Accounts Was Stolen
- Minnesota Cop Awarded $585K Over Unlawful License Lookups
