An Ontario man who pleaded guilty to a major data hack could spend anywhere from two to 30 years in prison. Connor Moucka, also known as Alexander, was arrested at his Kitchener home in October 2024 and extradited to the United States in July 2025. “Connor Moucka hacked over 150 companies and organizations, obtained extremely sensitive information, and extorted the victims for millions of dollars,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva, from the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a news release. Details revealed in court documents, obtained by CTV News, match the Snowflake hack. The U.S. Department of Justice said Moucka and his co-conspirators used stolen logins to access the data of at least 165 companies and organizations who used the cloud-based business, including AT&T, Live Nation, Ticketmaster and Advance Auto Parts. That information included non-content call and text history, banking details, payroll records, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration numbers, driver’s licence numbers, passport numbers and social security numbers. “The conspirators profited from the scheme, receiving over $2.5 million in ransom payments,” the Department of Justice said. “In at least one instance, Moucka re-extorted a victim with threats of further disclosure of the victim’s stolen data. Moucka used the stolen data of a government officer and members of a then-former government officer’s immediate family in this re-extortion attempt.” Information was then sold on cybercrime forums, with Moucka receiving a payout of at least $495,000. The hack reportedly cost the affected companies $9.6 million. Moucka pleaded guilty to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy. Cybersecurity reaction David Jao is a professor and chair in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, as well as the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. “The cloud is supposed to have pretty good security,” he told CTV News on Friday. “But, sometimes, the cloud companies don’t do their jobs properly and they get hacked.” Jao wasn’t surprised by the breach, just the magnitude of it. “The really unprecedented thing about these kinds of attack is the scale at which they happen,” he said. “It’s very easy for one hacker to get into one database to breach one company, which is serving as a contractor for all these other companies. They get access to everybody in the United States. That’s such a big scale and a much bigger problem… if only one of these companies got hacked.” The fact that the accused lived in an urban Ontario neighbourhood was also notable. “I think this is very unusual for somebody engaging in this activity to be located in Ontario, or even Canada or North America,” said Jao. “The vast majority of these criminal enterprises operate from other jurisdictions where Western law enforcement has a harder time reaching out and apprehending them.” Experts like Jao and Ritesh Kotak, a cybersecurity tech analyst, said data breaches are becoming more common. “As our lives become more digital and more online, clearly that means that hackers and fraudsters are going to exploit that,” said Kotak. Moucka will be sentenced on Oct. 27.
