Washington is pursuing an Apple engineer and allocating a $10 million reward for the arrest of a Russian hacker

The United States of America has announced that it is pursuing an Apple engineer and a $10 million reward for the arrest of a Russian hacker.

And the US Department of Justice stated that a reward of $10 million has been allocated for those who provide it with information leading to the arrest and conviction of a Russian hacker accused of being behind attacks targeting especially Washington police, schools and hospitals.

It added that the wanted person is Mikhail Matveev, who is accused of using electronic ransomware to attack targets in the United States from Russia with the intention of obtaining from his victims a financial ransom amounting to a total value of $ 200 million.

She pointed out that the hacker was encrypting the data of many victims, especially hospitals, schools, associations and police units, including the Washington police, and demanded sums of money from their owners in exchange for her release, noting that the accused used many pseudonyms, including “Wazawaka” and “” M1X and boresylcin, and if convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

Meanwhile, the United States charged a former Apple engineer in five cases related to alleged efforts to steal technology and transfer it to China, Russia and Iran.

She indicated that among these accusations was that the engineer targeted the company’s technology for independent systems, which is a group of prefixes for Internet protocol routing, then fled to China, in addition to stealing trade secrets and other technologies, and establishing procurement networks to help the Russian military and intelligence services obtain sensitive technology.

And the Ministry of Justice stated that the engineer was known as “Weibao Wang and informs”, at the age of 35, and he was residing in Mountain View, California, and that Apple appointed him in 2016, but in 2017 he accepted a job in the United States with a Chinese company working to develop self-driving cars before To resign from Apple, and wait about 4 months before informing the company of his new job.

The ministry added that after his last day at Apple, the company discovered that he had accessed a large set of data in the days preceding his departure, and they also found large amounts of data from Apple in his home in June 2018, confirming that the accused boarded a plane heading to China.

It is noteworthy that US prosecutors announced charges against “Liming Li” of stealing trade secrets from his employers in California to build his competitor’s company in China, and “Nikolaos Pogonikolos” of smuggling US military technology to Russia while working as a defense contractor with NATO.

The Russians, “Oleg Sergeevich” and “Vasily Sergeyevich”, were also charged with using their Florida company to send aircraft spare parts to Russian airlines, and charges were brought against “Xiang Jiangqiao” for allegedly using a Chinese company subject to US sanctions to provide materials used in the production of weapons of mass destruction. to Iran. En Qiao and Wang are still at large in China, while the four other suspects have been arrested.