A Swiss hacker named Till Kottmann has been accused by the US government of numerous attacks on major American companies.
The US indictment accuses Kottmann and his associates of piracy of "dozens of companies and government companies" but also of publishing private data and source code belonging to more than 100 companies on the Internet.
The 21-year-old Kottmann, better known as Tillie, recently connected after the security breach of the American company Verkada, which exposed footage from more than 150.000 surveillance cameras of the companies.
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 had previously shared code and data belonging to several companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Nissan, Nintendo, Disney, AMD, Qualcomm, Motorola, Adobe, Lenovo, Roblox and more (the companies are specifically named in the indictment).
The exact nature of these data differed in each case. A copy of hundreds of code repositories maintained by German automaker Daimler AG contained the source code for valuable smart car components, for example, while a breach of Nintendo's systems (which Kottmann said did not come from it directly, but which were republished via of a channel at Telegram) παρείχε στους players rare image of unreleased 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 that says "I love helping companies open source." messages to an anonymous partner requesting “access to any confidential information, documents, binaries or source code'. In tweets sent on October 21, Kottmann said that the "theft and circulation" of corporate data is "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.
