A Malaysian citizen has been sentenced to 10 years in a U.S. prison for hacking into the Federal Reserve and various private institutions.
The U.S. Justice Department issued a statement Friday announcing the sentence of Lin Mun Poo, who pleaded guilty in April to access device fraud. They say he also admitted to hacking a Fed computer server and installing a malicious software code.
The statement says Poo traveled to the United States in October last year for the purpose of selling stolen credit card and bank card numbers, but did not realize the purchaser was an undercover U.S. agent.
Officials say Poo had more than 122,000 stolen numbers in his heavily encrypted laptop computer and admitted hacking computers for money.
They say his activities extended to the national security sector and that in 2010, he hacked into the computer system of a Defense Department contractor that provides systems management services for military transport and other military operations.
The statement quotes U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch as saying the sentence sends the message to hackers around the world that the United States is no place to conduct their business.