Soldier arrested in US for leaking confidential call records of Trump and Harris

A US Army soldier has been arrested and charged with illegally selling confidential phone records of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Forbes reports on January 2.

What happened

Cameron John Wagenius, a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier, was arrested on suspicion of handing over confidential phone records of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The case is related to a 2024 cyberattack that targeted customers of the cloud platform Snowflake. In the summer of 2024, hackers used stolen passwords to break into Snowflake customer accounts. Among the victims were such well-known companies as Ticketmaster, Santander Bank, and Neiman Marcus. Using this scheme, the hackers stole a huge amount of personal data, including call and text message records of AT&T customers.

The investigation showed that the hack was a targeted attack on user accounts with single-factor authentication. In May 2024, a hacker known as Kiberphant0m boasted about the data theft on BreachForums, a platform for selling stolen information on the darknet.

Investigative journalist Brian Krebs and cybersecurity experts played a key role in the investigation. According to Krebs, the arrested Wagenius, who previously worked as a communications specialist in South Korea, was detained on December 20 near the military base in Fort Hood, Texas.

The indictment states that the suspect tried to sell confidential information about phone calls that were obtained fraudulently. His actions are classified as a violation of US data privacy laws.