Notorious Hacker Guccifer Extradited To US To Serve 4-Year Sentence

Guccifer — the notorious hacker from Romania who revealed that Hillary Clinton has a private email server — has begun serving his more than four-year prison sentence in the United States.

According to a report published by the Information Security Media Group (ISMG), the 46-year-old hacker, whose real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar, previously worked as a taxi driver. He admitted that he perpetrated a string of social media and email account takeovers while using his hacker handle Guccifer — a portmanteau of Gucci and Lucifer.

As the report detailed, Romania’s Alba Iulia Court of Appeal ruled in September that once Lazar finishes his seven-year-long prison sentence in Romania’s Deva city for his hacking crimes, he would be extradited to the United States to serve a 52-month sentence.

Per the Romanian media outlet Digi 24, Lazar appealed the ruling, but the Romanian high court dismissed his appeal on October 5. On October 23, a court in Romania’s Hunedoara decided that Lazar should be conditionally released from his seven-year sentence and be sent to the U.S. to begin his sentence there.

As mentioned in the ISMG report, Digi 24 reported on Monday that the hacker has already been handed over to authorities in the U.S.

His extradition has been confirmed by the U.S. Department of Justice to Information Security Media Group. Lazar is now in the U.S. and has begun serving his sentence.

Update: Department of Justice confirms that Marcel Lazar — aka the hacker known as #Guccifer — was last week sent by Romania to serve 52 months in U.S. prison, followed by 3 years of probation https://t.co/zUCUnV6NQP by @euroinfosec

— DataBreachToday (@DataBreachToday) November 16, 2018

In the confirmation that the Department of Justice’s spokeswoman sent to ISMG, it was said that “on Sept. 1, 2016, Marcel Lehel Lazar, aka ‘Guccifer,’ was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge James C. Cacheris to serve 52 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, following his May 25, 2016, guilty plea in the Eastern District of Virginia to unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft.”

“Pursuant to the agreement with Romanian authorities, Lazar returned to Romania to finish his Romanian sentence and was returned last week to the United States to serve his U.S. sentence.”

From 2012 to 2014, Lazar allegedly hacked various social media and email accounts, including Gmail, Facebook, AOL and other accounts by brute-force guessing their weak passwords. Per the report, Lazar targeted various Romanian celebrities and officials, including lawmakers and members of the state security services.

“His list of U.S. victims included former Secretary of State Colin Powell and President George W. Bush, from whom Lazar stole and released a painted self-portrait of Bush in the bathtub,” the report said.

Lazar’s also revealed that Hillary Clinton used a private email address when she was serving as the U.S. secretary of state. The revelation, that resulted in a scandal, dogged her 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

A later investigation into Clinton’s email server by the FBI, however, led to the conclusion that there was no evidence of wrongdoing or signs that anyone had hacked the email server, the ISMG report said.