A Swiss hacker named Till Kottmann has been accused by the US government for many attacks on large American companies.
The US indictment accuses Kottmann and his associates of piracy of "dozens of companies and government companies" but also publishing private data and source code belonging to more than 100 companies online.
21-year-old Kottmann, who is better known as Tillie, recently joined after the breach better safetyof the American company Verkada, which exposed footage from more than 150.000 of the companies' surveillance cameras.
However, the allegations filed this week date back to 2019, with Kottmann and his associates accused of targeting gits owned by major private and public sector companies by copying and sharing content. on a site they founded and maintained called git.rip.
Git.rip has since been seized by the FBI, but has previously leaked code and data belonging to many companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Nissan, Nintendo, Disney, AMD, Qualcomm, Motorola, Adobe, Lenovo, Roblox and many more. companies are explicitly mentioned in the indictment).
The exact nature of this data differed in each case. A copy of hundreds of code repositories held by the German carmaker Daimler AG contained the source code for valuable parts of the smart car, for example, while a breach of Nintendo systems (which Kottmann said did not come directly from it, but which were directly of a Telegram channel) provided players with a rare picture of non-released features from old games.
The indictment includes as evidence the many tweets and messages sent by Kottmann using aliases such as @deletescape and @antiproprietary.
These include a tweet sent on May 17, 2020 stating that "I love helping companies open their code." messages to an anonymous partner requesting "access to any confidential information, documents, binaries or source code". In tweets sent on October 21, Kottmann said the "theft and circulation" of corporate data was "morally correct."
Kottmann is currently with his friends in Lucerne, Switzerland, where they were recently arrested by Swiss authorities and their devices confiscated.
It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. The Bloomberg reports that Kottmann currently has a lawyer, Marcel Bosonnet, who represented Edward Snowden.
Charges against Kottmann could carry him up to 20 years in prison.
