A former US Army soldier has been sentenced to 70 months in prison for his role in a hacking and extortion campaign targeting at least 10 US technology and telecommunications companies between April 2023 and December 2024.
Cameron John Wagenius, 21, also known online as “kiberphant0m” and “cyb3rph4nt0m,” was arrested in Texas in December 2024. He pleaded guilty in February 2025 to hacking AT&T and Verizon and later pleaded guilty to charges including aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and computer-related extortion.
According to court documents, Wagenius was serving in the US Army when he and his accomplices stole login credentials to company networks. The group used an SSH brute-force tool that Wagenius helped develop and communicated through Telegram to share stolen credentials and plan attacks.
After stealing data, the group threatened companies with releasing it on cybercrime forums, including BreachForums and XSS.is, unless they paid ransoms. In some cases, the stolen information was also offered for sale. Authorities said the group attempted to extort at least $1 million from victims and used some stolen data in other fraud schemes, including SIM-swapping attacks.
In addition to the prison sentence, Wagenius was ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution for breaking into telecommunications databases, accessing sensitive customer information and attempting to extort the companies.
Wagenius is the third man prosecuted in connection with the 2024 Snowflake data theft campaign, which also involved Connor Riley Moucka, aka “Waifu” and “Judische,” and John Erin Binns, aka “irdev” and “j_irdev1337.” The duo were accused of breaching more than 165 organizations through accounts connected to Snowflake's cloud data platform and demanding ransom payments.
Moucka was arrested in Canada in October 2024 and pleaded guilty in August 2026 to his role in the Snowflake hacking campaign. The attacks affected customers of major organizations, including AT&T, Ticketmaster, Santander, Los Angeles Unified, LendingTree, Pure Storage, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus.