Turns out the Russian hacker accused of LinkedIn hack is a bigger fish than expected — The indictment made by Justice department shows he was also behind Dropbox and FormSpring hacks.
Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, the 29-year-oldRussian hacker was arrested in Prague when he was ordering food. Initially, authorities revealed he was a suspect in massive LinkedIn data breach in which 117 million user accounts were stolen in 2012 and made available for sale in May 2016.
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Now, according to the press release from Justice department that discusses Nikulin’s indictment it has been revealed that LinkedIn was not the only company he breached into, in fact, he has been also accused of hacking online file hosting service Dropbox, Social Q&A portal Formspring and stealing a million worth bitcoins from the bitcoin exchange Bitcoin BitMarket.eu in 2013 and 620 from another exchange.
Authorities believe Nikulin has allegedly stolen accounts from the aforementioned websites and tried selling them for about $6000. Although it is not directly clear that it is Nikulin who also stole 620 bitcoins, a Microsoft security researcher Tal Be’ery told Eduard Kovacs of SecurityWeek he is positive that it is the same person.
This is in fact due to the account name that has been used; Chinabig01. This is the address that BitMarket.eu’s owner believes to have caused the website to come to a halt. The website crashed once it was hacked transferring 620 bitcoins to the hacker’s own account. The owner says the email used was [email protected].
3/ However, searching for his handle "[email protected]" reveals he was probably behind a much more lucrative #bitcoin exchange hack
— Tal Be'ery (@TalBeerySec) October 24, 2016
Further investigation has revealed that the same email has been involved in stealing more bitcoins from other platforms totaling up to 1532 bitcoins. Converting it into dollar currency, the value is equivalent to $1 million.
The investigator has tracked down the email address and it reveals that both the hack and the theft was committed by the same person, Mr. Nikulin. The address also shows the same location.
4/ Same handle (chinabig01), Similar MO (Web hacking), Same Geo (#Russia) pic.twitter.com/PLi2oIJqFJ
— Tal Be'ery (@TalBeerySec) October 24, 2016
LinkedIn hacker Nikulin Filed Indictment by Waqas Amir on Scribd
The year 2016 may have been bad for social media and tech giants including MySpace, Dropbox, Twitter, LinkedIn, VK.com and Weebly but when it comes to nabbing the alleged culprits the authorities are not far either.
Also Read: 7 Online Activities That Can Get You Arrested
In July, US authorities arrested KickAss Torrents owner in Poland. A man who hacked Kernel.org, Linux Foundation in 2011 was also arrested last month in Miami whilst in June this year, Russian authorities arrested 50 hackers stealing 25 million from banks using malware.
