Connor Moucka, a 26-year-old Canadian citizen, has pled guilty to hacking more than 165 companies, stealing billions of records, and extorting several companies and individuals.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the guilty plea in a press release.
Moucka was accused of hacking cloud provider Snowflake, which allowed him and his co-conspirators to break into dozens of the company’s customers, including AT&T, LendingTree, and Ticketmaster. Moucka stole data from more than 100 million AT&T customers, including call and texting records, as well as banking information, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers from other breaches.
Over the years, Moucka and his accomplices received more than $2.5 million in ransom payments. The hacker also received around $500,000 for selling victims’ data on hacking forums such as the notorious BreachForums. Victims of Moucka and his accomplices’ hacks suffered $9.5 million in losses, according to the DOJ.
“Connor Moucka’s threats and re-extortion tactics were calculated and predatory, and his actions did real harm to his victims, be they companies targeted for theft and extortion or the millions of everyday people who are their customers,” said W. Mike Herrington, an FBI special agent who worked on the case.
Moucka, who was known online as Waifu and Judische, was arrested in Canada at the end of 2024, just months after the Snowflake breaches.
At the time, Austin Larsen, a senior researcher at Google’s cybersecurity firm Mandiant who had been investigating the Snowflake hacks, said Moucka was “one of the most consequential” hackers of 2024.
Moucka is scheduled to be sentenced on October 27 and faces decades in prison.