Hacker faces three years in prison for child porn, Nintendo data breaches
He also has to pay Nintendo more than $200,000 in restitution.
Ryan Hernandez, the 21-year-old who spent years breaking into Nintendo servers, was sentenced to three years in prison today for his hacking exploits and possession of child pornography. The Palmdale, CA resident pleaded guilty to both charges in January 2020 and originally faced sentencing the following April, but the process was postponed due to COVID-related court delays. As part of sentencing, he will also pay Nintendo $259,323 to Nintendo “for the remediation costs caused by his conduct,” according to a release from the US Department of Justice
Hernandez became known to the gaming community at large for his audacious hacking efforts, which began in earnest while he was still a minor. Per the DoJ, Hernandez and an unnamed accomplice phished a Nintendo employee in 2016 and used their credentials to access the confidential company files, including information about the then-unreleased Nintendo Switch. After the FBI completed its investigation, agents contacted his family in an attempt to head off future hacks, but Hernandez continued anyway and released several troves of internal data between 2018 and 2019.
While his attempts to steal data Nintendo were what caught the FBI’s attention, agents assigned to search Hernandez’s home in June 2019 made a chilling discovery: more than 1,000 images of “minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct”. As such, Hernandez will be required to register as a sex offender, and faces seven years of supervised release following upon completion of his sentence.
