Houston Hacker Indicted In Cyber-Attack On LA Court System

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – A 32-year-old Houston man has been indicted by a federal grand jury on allegations he conducted a complex cyber-attack against the Los Angeles County Superior Court computer system.

The Department of Justice reported Friday that 32-year-old Oriyomi Sadiq Aloba hacked into the accounts of at least 18 L.A. Superior Court employees and sent out a staggering two million phishing emails.

The alleged activity occurred over the period of about a week in July 2017, the DOJ said. He would log into the LASC servers and send out the hundreds of thousands of fake emails with which he sought to steal people's personal information.

Some of the emails, for example, purported to be from American Express and asked victims to turn over their credit card information by linking to a fake American Express website, the DOJ reports.

Aloha faces multiple counts of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, unauthorized access to obtain information and aggravated identity theft.

If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 17 years in prison.