Report: FBI 'Quietly Solves' Theft of 168 Million People's Personal Data

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has “quietly solved” the theft of data from 168 million people, which was attributed to a 28-year-old hacker.

168 million users from “some of the internet’s most popular websites,” were affected in the data theft.

“The culprit in the breaches is a 28-year-old Arkansas man named Kyle Milliken, who, along with colleagues, stole email addresses and account passwords to feed a lucrative and hugely annoying spam operation that ran from 2010 to 2014,” reported the Daily Beast. “Last month Milliken was sentenced to 17 months at a federal work camp — a sentence lightened by his cooperation with the FBI. He’s set to begin his sentence on May 24. His case remains under seal in federal court in San Jose, California.”

Milliken earned so much money from his nefarious internet practices that in 2014, the hacker “was living in a $2 million home behind the gates of a 25,000-square-foot estate in the Burbank Hills.”

“His spam was paying the rent and, he said, a private chef and a personal driver, because Los Angeles traffic freaked him out,” the Daily Beast explained, before he was finally caught after forgetting to use a VPN while illegally accessing servers.

Milliken then “gave up a friend he’d been working with,” in return for a reduced sentence.