Ed Sheeran hacker jailed

A hacker who stole unreleased music from artists including Ed Sheeran and Kanye West, before selling them for more than £130,000, has been jailed for 18 months.

22-year-old Adrian Kwiatkowski illegally accessed cloud-based accounts owned by dozens of top artists including American rapper and songwriter Frank Ocean. He made electronic copies of unfinished songs, intending to sell them online.

Representatives of Ocean contacted the New York District Attorney's Office when they discovered that the Dropbox account of Ocean's producer had been hacked and the content offered for sale by someone known online as "Spirdark".

An email address used to set up Spirdark's cryptocurrency account was linked to Kwiatkowski, and the IP address of the device used to hack one of the accounts was traced to his home in Ipswich, Suffolk.

Seven devices were seized from Kwiatkowski's home following his arrest, including a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists. A document saved on the hard drive summarised the method he had used to obtain them.

His Bitcoin wallet, then worth £64,000, was also seized. A review of Kwiatkowski's bank account showed that he had deposited a total of £67,275 from February 2018 to September 2019, £61,855 of which was from his cryptocurrency accounts.

Ipswich Crown Court was told that the investigation by City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit, supported by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, revealed Kwiatkowski had made £131,000.

The uindividual pleaded guilty to 14 copyright offences, three counts of computer misuse, and three offences under the Proceeds of Crime Act at Ipswich magistrates' court in August.

Sheeran's manager, Stuart Camp, said it was hard to estimate the exact amount of money his client had lost due to the hack, but that the cost of abandoning a track could run into six figures.