Welcome back. It's great to be with you again. This is Emlex's weekly podcast covering regulatory affairs around the globe. James Panicki is my name and I'm Emlex's Asia Pacific senior editor.

Today's news would be of great interest to anyone with a LinkedIn profile or anyone who has

ever used cloud storage service Dropbox. A Russian hacker by the name of Yevgeny Nikolan has

been found guilty in a US court in San Francisco of hacking

LinkedIn and Dropbox some eight years ago. It was a long controversial trial because, as our

reporting has suggested, there was no smoking gun, no jaw-dropping evidence, just a pile of

circumstantial evidence that eventually all added up to a jury

finding Nicolin guilty. The trial was also noteworthy because it was a mainly but not entirely

online affair as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. M-Mex's senior correspondent for

data privacy and security is Amy Miller and she followed the case through the final stretch with our Digital Risk Chief Global correspondent Mike Swift covering it before that.

Both Amy and Mike join us now from San Francisco.

So, Amy, let's start with you.

For those unfamiliar with the case, in just a few words,

who is Yvgeny Nikolin? And what has he now been found guilty of doing? He's a 32-year-old Russian

National who's been found guilty on nine criminal counts of breaking into the computer networks

of Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Form Spring. That was in 2012 and 2013. The jury

found him guilty on July 20th. And the third of those companies is no longer operational, right?

So we're really just, the main, the real protagonist here is LinkedIn. That is the most

significant player and Dropbox. That's correct. Form Spring is now defunct.

Okay. As for the trial itself, I suppose the most remarkable part of this prosecution was the

absence of strong evidence linking Nicolin to the hacks. Just what evidence were prosecutors

able to bring to the table? Well, for three days, the FBI's key witness, special agent Jeffrey Miller,

...