DETROIT (WXYZ) — Matt Weiss remained mum while leaving federal court after being formally charged Monday.
The former Michigan football offensive coordinator is accused of illegally gaining access to thousands of female students’ social media and cloud storage accounts and downloading personal, intimate pictures and videos that prosecutors say were never intended to be shared beyond their intimate partners.
Michigan placed Weiss on administrative leave in January 2023 after university police started their investigation.
PREVIOUS REPORT: Michigan co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss placed on leave
He was fired two weeks later.
PREVIOUS REPORT: Michigan co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss fired
Michigan declined to comment, referring all questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The feds say Weiss hacked into a database of student-athletes at more than 100 colleges and universities that was maintained by Keffer Development Services, a third-party vendor.
“Getting access to this information for average people is not easy, but him having access to this database definitely made it easier,” said cyber security expert Kevin Nether. “Him having access to that is step one. Step two took effort to link everything together, took effort to get access to email addresses, and do forgot passwords, and linking those two things together. That sort of work in the background takes a lot of time and effort to do. It’s nothing you stumble across it’s something you have to be extremely intentional about doing,” says cybersecurity expert Kevin Nether.
Now, a former Michigan gymnast and a soccer player are suing Keffer, Weiss, the University of Michigan and its Board of Regents, saying:
The recklessness and negligence and misconduct of the regents, the university, and Keffer… enabled Weiss to target female college athletes to obtain their private and sensitive information without authorization.
Acting U.S. Attorney Julie Beck charged Weiss with 14 counts of unauthorized access to computers and 10 counts of aggravated identity theft.
Legal expert and criminal defense attorney Jim Makowski shared his thoughts on the case.
“The government has a tough case to prove, but on the other hand, they’ve been investigating this a long time. I’m personally familiar with the US Attorney who is prosecuting this case, and I have to say he is a very smart, very talented attorney, and I think that Mr. Weiss has a problem,” Jim Makowski said.
We reached out to Keffer Development Services for comment but have not received a response.
Weiss received a $10,000 unsecured bond. He was ordered to surrender his passport and allow the court to install network monitoring software on his devices to keep tabs on his internet usage.
