Investigates

11 Investigates: Russian hacker targets western Pa. school district

An international hacking scheme started and ended in western Pennsylvania.

It was one of the largest and most sophisticated hacking schemes ever devised, and a local school district ended up in the middle of the investigation.

Target 11′s Rick Earle discovered that the thieves tried to make off with $990,000 from the Sharon School District.

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It was a decade later that the FBI identified the world’s top cyber criminal as Russian national Maskin Yakubets.

U.S. Attorney Scott Brady told Channel 11, “He’s been very elusive. He went by the moniker ‘Aqua’ and he’s been eluding law enforcement for better than a decade.”

Rick Earle got an exclusive look inside the local facility where cyber experts cracked the case. You can see more of how they tracked down this international criminal in the story above.

The map below shows the locations of U.S. victims of the Russian cyber hack.