SAN JOSE — A former Yahoo! engineer who hacked 6,000 accounts on a hunt for private sexual videos and pictures was sentenced this week to five years probation, with a home confinement condition, months after pleading guilty to a federal offense.
Reyes Daniel Ruiz, 35, of Tracy, is allowed to leave his home for “verified employment, medical needs and religious services,” according to the sentencing terms. He has also been ordered to pay nearly $125,000 in fines and restitution, court records show.
Ruiz targeted accounts of younger women, including personal friends and work colleagues, and made copies of sexual images and videos he found in the accounts. He also accessed financial information, but his main goal was to steal pornographic files, prosecutors said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Kaleba asked for Ruiz to be sentenced to “a period of incarceration,” arguing he’d violated not only the trust of his employee but the privacy of thousands of people.
“By his estimation, he downloaded approximately two terabytes of data, and possessed between 1,000 and 4,000 private images and videos,” Kaleba wrote in a sentencing memo.
The defense argued that Ruiz, who has no criminal history, deserved leniency because he accepted responsibility quickly. He admitted to destroying the hard drive where he stored the ill-gotten files when the FBI visited his home in August 2018.
Ruiz told federal investigators that he acquired the pictures and videos for his own personal “self-gratification” and that he didn’t share them online, a pre-sentence report says. He faced up to five years in prison along with a $250,000 fine.
