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 hacking "dozens of companies and government companies" and publishing private data and source code belonging to more than 100 companies on the internet.network.
21-year-old Kottmann, who is better known as Tillie, was recently linked after the infringement security of the American company Verkada, which exposed footage from more than 150.000 of the companies' surveillance cameras.
However, the charges filed this weekteam dating back to 2019, with Kottmann and his associates accused of targeting repositories (“gits”) belonging to major private and public sector companies, copying their contents and sharing them on a website they founded and maintained and it's 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.