Three charged in cyberattacks against U.S. banks

NEW YORK — Two men held in Israel and one U.S. citizen believed to be living in Moscow have been charged with stealing the contact information of more than 100 million customers of U.S. financial institutions to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits, authorities said Tuesday.

The summer 2014 theft of data such as names, addresses, emails and phone numbers of more than 83 million customers of JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation’s biggest bank by assets, was described at a news conference by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara as “the single largest theft of customer data from a U.S. financial institution ever.”

An indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court said identifying information on millions more customers was stolen in cyberattacks from 2012 to last summer against several other financial institutions, financial services corporations and financial news publishers.

Since 2007, one or more of the defendants also engaged in other criminal schemes, the indictment said.

Charged in the indictment were Gery Shalon, 31, of Savyon, Israel; Ziv Orenstein, 40, of Bat Hefer, Israel; and Joshua Samuel Aaron, 31, a U.S. citizen living in Moscow and Tel Aviv. All three were charged in July with related crimes. Aaron was labeled a fugitive while Orenstein and Shalon were arrested in Israel in July.

Bharara said the U.S. was seeking their extradition.