May 19, 2020
Famous Hacker “Sanix” Exposed
By Marko Vidrih on The Capital
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) detained a hacker in Ivano-Frankivsk, known as “Sanix”. At the beginning of last year, he attracted the attention of world cybersecurity experts by posting on one of the forums an announcement about the sale of a database with 773 million email addresses and 21 million unique passwords.
According to the SBU, in January 2019, The Guardian, Forbes and Newsweek wrote about the hacker, the Italia 1 channel dedicated the story to him, as the database he put up for sale was “the largest ever stolen data array.”
Experts have found that the 87 GB database put up by the hacker for sale makes up only a small part of the total amount of data that he has taken over. According to the SBU, the hacker had at least seven such stolen and broken password databases, the total amount of which reached almost 1 TB. They included personal, including financial, data from residents of the European Union and North America.
SBU has received information that the probable hacker “Sanix” is a Ukrainian, a resident of the Ivano-Frankivsk region.
SBU cyber specialists discovered an attacker’s sale of databases with logins and passwords for e-mail accounts, PIN codes for bank cards, crypto-wallets, PayPal accounts, as well as information about computers that were hacked for further use in botnets and for organizing DDoS attacks.
During searches at the hacker’s place of residence, law enforcement officers seized computer equipment with two terabytes of stolen information, phones with evidence of illegal activity and cash from illegal operations in the amount of more than $10.000.
Author: Marko Vidrih
Featured image credit: Unsplash
