Music leaking is not a new thing in the industry. But how the data goes out before the release date is still a mystery. However, the latest case of hacking hints, the professional musicians are scoring on the top priority list of the cybercriminals. After the much-talked ransomware attack on Radiohead's guitarist Johny Greenwood, a new case has created some fresh ripples over the music industries' safety.
Hacker produced to court for stealing over 50GB of unreleased music footages
A hacker aged 27 years called Christian Erazo was allegedly arrested and produced to Manhattan Federal Court for stealing over 50GB of unreleased music footages from the heavyweight executives of the music industry. He allegedly snooped into the online accounts and then copied the unreleased music available from their devices.
Erazo is facing some aggravated cybercrime charges including identity theft, conspiracy to commit computer encroachment, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and expected to get a 20 years imprisonment sentence.
Data stolen consisted recordings of 20 artists
According to the imputations filed by the US authorities in the Manhattan federal court, Erazo invaded into the cloud data storage of two popular music companies and downloaded over 50GB of unreleased music data.
The data he stole consists of recordings of 20 artists archived between the year 2016 and 2017. Moreover, Erazo had also gained access to the social networking account of a Los Angeles based music producer and impersonated it to connect the music stars. Later he tried to contact them via private messages.
Surprisingly the hacker was not alone in the conspiracy, and he took help of some co-conspirators to gain access to the music-management companies login credentials and accessed the same for over 2,300 times.
According to the indictment, later he cloned the victims' Twitter ID and contracted different music celebrities via private messages and asked them to send unreleased music tracks to a mail ID he setup. A forensic test has proved that the hacker had illegally downloaded a total of 850 unreleased tracks.
After facing the authorities of the law enforcement department, Erazo has accepted of illegally accessing the cloud and stealing over 100 professional-quality unreleased music worth 50GB.
