A Michigan man has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison after hacking a prison system to shorten the sentence of an associate.

Twenty-seven-year-old Konrads Voits, the not-so-bright criminal mastermind in the story, engaged in a spear-phishing campaign to hack into the Washtenaw County Jail’s computer system between January and March 2017 in an attempt to alter sentencing records.

Voits sent emails to jail employees attempting to trick them into visiting the domain “ewashtenavv.org,” a carbon copy of the county’s official website of “ewashtenaw.org” but one that instead captured login details, according to Gizmodo.

Surprisingly, given how these stories usually go, that campaign failed. So instead he took to calling county jail employees posing as members of the jail’s information technology staff, managing to trick a worker into installing a fake update package that then gave him access to the network.

With access, Voits obtained the ability to view search warrant affidavits, internal discipline records from the jail and the personal information of county employees. Then he stole the usernames, passwords, email addresses and other information relating to 1,600 government workers.

He also managed to change the sentencing details on the system of exactly one person, presumably his associate. The hack was discovered the old fashioned way, by a sheriff who compared the release date for the convict with paper records before he was scheduled in the system to be released.

Voits pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal in December to one count of damaging a protected computer. Court records noted that the hack had caused approximately $235,000 in damage, presumably repair costs for the computer network. His sentence is 87 months.

Photo: 52282631@N07/Flickr