Pleads guilty in Manhattan federal court

Oct 8, 2009 14:30 GMT  ·  By

A 25-year-old Pennsylvania man, who was arrested back in March for using an administrative password without authorization to transfer funds into his account with a currency exchange service, pleaded guilty on September 29. The hacker has previously spent over an year in jail for a stock swindling scheme.

Van T. Dinh was 19 in 2003 when he became a media attraction for being the person charged in U.S. for identity theft through computer hacking. The teenage hacker who also engaged in online stock trading, and remained stuck with $90,000-worth of Cisco derivatives, which were about to expire.

In order to cut his losses, Dinh crafted a computer trojan, which he advertised on specialized forums under a false identity as a stock market analysis tool. The malware featured a keylogging component which helped the hacker steal the login credentials for the online brokerage account of a Massachusetts investor.

Dinh placed his overpriced stock options for sale, logged into his victim's account and bought some of them. In this way, he was able to obtain $37,000. At the time, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) described his attack as "unusually complex." The swindler was subsequently charged and sentenced to thirteen months in prison and three years of supervised release.

In May of this year, Dinh was arrested by the FBI for a different scheme he instrumented in December 2008. According to court records, the hacker set up an account with an unnamed currency exchange service in New York. He then logged in with an administrative password and made two unauthorized transfers of $55,000 each to his account and another one of $140,326 into the account of a different customer.

A judge refused bail for Dinh on grounds of him being a danger to the community due to his repeated hacking activities. Wired reports that the hacker pleaded guilty to computer fraud and identity theft and is currently being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.