A Saskatoon man is being held in a U.S. jail awaiting trial on hacking charges

Green lights illuminate cable terminals on the Sberbank and SberCloud Christofari supercomputer during an event to mark its launch into commercial operation inside the Sberbank PJSC data processing center (DPC) at the Skolkovo Innovation Center in Moscow, Russia, on Monday, Dec. 16, 2019. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg)

A Saskatoon man has been extradited to the United States to stand trial on hacking charges.

Ryan James Roach, a 35-year-old Saskatoon man, is accused of hacking into multiple supercomputers at educational institutions across the U.S. to install malware — hijacking the processing power from their heavy-duty hardware to mine an obscure cryptocurrency called Electroneum.

Roach was extradited to the U.S. on Oct. 28, five months after a Saskatoon Court of King’s Bench judge signed off on the order.

Now, U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo says the path has been cleared for him to go to trial.

On Tuesday, DiGiacomo announced that a federal grand jury had heard the evidence against Roach and his alleged accomplice, 41-year-old Mathiew James Stubbings, and opted to return an indictment charging the two men with conspiracy to obtain information from and to cause damage to a protected computer, and intentional damage to a protected computer.

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The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of New York outlined the indictment in a Nov. 3 news release. It accuses Roach and Stubbings of using virtual private servers in multiple countries — which were registered under false names — to transmit malware and mining software to victim computers, steal login credentials and secretly mine cryptocurrency for financial gain.

The targets were high-compute machines located at unnamed post-secondary institutions in New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Massachusetts.

“To carry out the scheme, Roach and Stubbings surreptitiously accessed victim computers without authorization, deployed malware to gain control, stole victim login credentials, exfiltrated the data to servers that they controlled, and forcing victim computers to use their processing power to mine cryptocurrency for the financial benefit of the defendants,” the release said.

According to Justice Grant Currie, who approved the letter of committal for Roach’s extradition, repairs on one of the supercomputers alone were estimated to have cost over $300,000.

In Currie’s decision, he said U.S. investigators had evidence from Google search history that Roach researched security vulnerabilities in the target computers.

Currie also noted that from the evidence he reviewed, it appeared Stubbings was the principal actor.

In the lead-up to his extradition, Roach told court he had teamed up with Stubbings on unrelated business and that Stubbings had access to the servers involved in the attack.

Roach maintains he was unaware of Stubbings’ plan and did not learn about the hacks until they were already underway, at which point he began researching to find out what Stubbings was doing.

Roach says that should be clear from the evidence, because he only began researching high-performance computing at one of the institutions during the attack, and not before.

Roach is being held in custody in the U.S. pending a detention hearing on Jan. 7.

Extradition proceedings for Stubbings are still underway in Ontario.

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