A Texas hacker has admitted that he stole $274,000 from a subsidiary of Digital River Inc., the Eden Prairie-based e-commerce company, by redirecting electronic payment transfers to his personal account.
Jeremey Parker, 26, of Houston, pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in St. Paul to wire fraud. Parker also admitted hacking into and damaging servers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
According to a plea agreement, from Dec. 23, 2008, through Oct. 15, 2009, Parker also hacked into a computer network belonging to Digital River through a subsidiary, SWReg Inc.
SWReg pays independent software developers who write code for Digital River's computer system. Royalties owed to those developers are tabulated at SWReg, and the developers go online, view the balances in their accounts and cash out those royalties.
Parker admitted that he transferred money from SWReg's system to his bank account rather than to the developers' accounts.
This is the second time Digital River has been victimized by an alleged hacker. A huge data theft from Digital River led investigators in May to hackers in India and a 19-year-old in New York who is suspected of trying to sell the information to a Colorado marketing firm for $500,000.
In the NASA intrusion, Parker admitted that on Sept 24, 2009, he hacked into two computer servers that offer scientists access to oceanographic data collected by Earth satellites. NASA spent about $43,000 to repair the damage, temporarily denying 3,300 users access to the data.
Parker was not charged in that incident, but it will be considered at his sentencing in St. Paul.
