A Canadian man was extradited to the United States for hijacking a supercomputer at an American university for mining

According to Decrypt, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that a Canadian man has been extradited to the United States, facing charges of assisting in the intrusion of university computers, stealing login credentials, and secretly mining cryptocurrency.

A federal grand jury in the Western District of New York indicted 35-year-old Ryan James Roach, a resident of Saskatchewan, and 41-year-old Mathiew James Stubbings, a resident of Ontario, on charges including conspiracy to obtain and damage protected computer information, obtaining protected computer information, and intentionally damaging protected computers, which could result in a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The indictment shows that between June 2016 and December 2019, the two targeted U.S. educational institutions with supercomputers, first researching their cybersecurity weaknesses before executing the intrusions. Once inside the systems, they allegedly deployed malware, stole login credentials, and forced the victims' computers to mine for them.

Victims included institutions in New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. The two reportedly used virtual private servers registered under false names in multiple countries to send malware and mining programs and store stolen credentials, while also forwarding attacks through other victims' compromised computers to hide their identities.

Roach was extradited from Canada on October 28 and was arraigned in Rochester, New York, where he is currently detained awaiting a detention hearing. Extradition proceedings for Stubbings are still ongoing in Canada. This case falls under cryptocurrency hijacking, where attackers use others' computers to mine, leaving the victims to bear the electricity costs and suffer performance degradation. The Department of Justice did not specify the particular cryptocurrencies mined by the two.

Google's Threat Intelligence team released a report on Monday stating that attackers are expected to increasingly prioritize LLMjacking over traditional resource thefts like cryptocurrency hijacking, which involves hijacking corporate access to AI models and shifting the billing.