An alleged conspirator in the giant financial services hack of 2014 has returned to American soil. [See MFWire's living timeline for more updates and history on the great financial services hack.]

Joshua Aaron

Joshua Aaron, one of nine people charged in connection with an alleged hacking conspiracy that hit Fidelity [profile] and J.P. Morgan [profile] and a host of other financial services giants and at least one publisher, pled not guilty last night in New York before a federal judge, the same day he was arrested at JFK airport in Queens, Bloomberg reports. (Reuters reports that Aaron is expected in court again this morning.) Since May, Aaron has reportedly been held by Russian authorities in a Moscow-area detention facility for illegal immigrants.

The return of Aaron, a native Marylander, follows the extradition to the U.S. of two Israelis and the arrest of two Floridans all tied to part or all of the same conspiracy. Aaron reportedly pled not guilty to 16 criminal charges, and U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis ordered that Aaron be held without bail. Ben Brafman, Aaron's attorney, tells Bloomberg that Aaron returned to the U.S. voluntarily.

The conspiracy allegedly netted hundreds of millions of dollars and involved: online casinos, an illegal bitcoin exchange, emails to inflate stock prices, money laundering, and hacking of J.P. Morgan, E*Trade, Scottrade, Dow Jones, and other financial services and media companies by taking advantage of the so-called "Heartbleed" vulnerability. Additionally, multiple reports over the past year have identified Fidelity as the "one of the world's financial services corporations" identified in the November 2015 indictment as "Victim-2." The way the prosecutors tell it, once the hackers struck, Victim-2 promptly "recognized and repaired the Heartbleed vulnerability in its systems." 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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