A 21-year-old Californian boy calling himself RyanRocks Online has pleaded guilty to hacking against the servers of the Japanese glove of the Nintendo video game industry several times since 2016. RyanRocks (real name Ryan S. Hernandez) has admitted being served by phishing techniques to quickly access information about company projects. The accused had already been pointed out in the past for having published a Nintendo development kit in which he had hidden malicious software allowing remote access to infected machines. Because of this, he would have drawn the wrath of certain members of the Nintendo pirate community.
According to the indictment filed in Washington State Federal Court last December, he operated with an anonymous partner to steal employee login credentials for Nintendo’s proprietary servers. Hernandez used this unauthorized access to download thousands of files, including proprietary development tools and non-public information about upcoming Nintendo products, and to access pirated and indie video games.
FBI agents confronted Hernandez with his hacking in 2017, according to a press release from the prosecution, and obtained from the latter a promise that he would put an end to all his malicious activities. But the young man continued his pirating acts from 2018 2019, said the accusation, until a descent of the feds in June 2019 which allowed to obtain hard disks containing thousands of Nintendo proprietary files. The seized hard drives also contained sexually explicit images of minors in a folder called BAD STUFF, prosecutors said.
RyanRocks has agreed to pay nearly $ 260,000 Nintendo as part of an agreement. Prosecutors recommend a three-year prison sentence for the Hernandez crimes when the verdict is announced next April.
Source: Scribd (indictment)
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