An Army soldier who used the online persona Kiberphant0m was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison for hacking telecommunications companies and extorting them over stolen data. Cameron John Wagenius, 22, pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the theft of call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024, as well as attacks on Verizon's Push-to-Talk service and other telecoms. He was also ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution.
According to KrebsOnSecurity, Wagenius operated from a U.S. Army base in South Korea and gained access through Snowflake cloud accounts that had exposed credentials and no multi-factor authentication. He bragged on cybercrime forums, publicly extorted victim companies, and at one point posted what he claimed were call logs for then President-elect Donald Trump and then Vice President Kamala Harris. Prosecutors said he was assisted by Kenneth Schuchman, a prior Satori botnet operator; two other alleged co-conspirators still face charges.
Wagenius cooperated after his arrest, but prosecutors said that while incarcerated he used other inmates' email accounts to ask a commercial AI tool for Windows privilege-escalation exploits, a D-Link command-injection vulnerability, antenna construction advice, and prison-escape research. The government said it had no evidence he used the vulnerabilities against Bureau of Prisons systems.