Adrian Kwiatkowski, a hacker from Ipswich in England who stole two unreleased songs by Ed Sheeran, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison, fixed with the BBC. Kwiatkowski sold Sheeran’s tracks, alongside with 12 other songs by American rapper Lil Uzi Vert, for cryptocurrency price £131,000 (US$148,000) on the sunless net. UK prosecutors acknowledged Kwiatkowski received his hands on the unreleased tracks by hacking into their cloud-essentially based mostly accounts. They did not specify which cloud services and products these had been, but he stole from great extra artists, because of authorities stumbled on 1,263 unreleased songs in his possession. 

American authorities launched an investigation abet in 2019 after a lot of musicians reported to the Contemporary York District Criminal skilled’s dwelling of business that any individual the usage of the name Spirdark had hacked their accounts and changed into selling their shriek material online. Investigators in a roundabout diagram linked Kwiatkowski to the email handle Spirdark aged with the cryptocurrency yarn serious regarding the case. Extra, his UK handle changed into linked to an IP handle that changed into stumbled on in the case of 1 among the hacked gadgets. 

When he changed into arrested, London police stumbled on seven gadgets that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 diversified artists. Authorities stumbled on extra incriminating files in his laborious drive, collectively with a story where he detailed the components he aged to hack into the victims’ accounts. They moreover stumbled on his Bitcoins, which he admitted to receiving in return for the songs. In all, he pled guilty to 19 costs that included copyright infringement and possessing felony property, ample to put him away for a year-and-a-half.

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